Winter Is Here and the Time Is Right For A "Whatchoo Reading?" Thread

Although the solistice is fully a week away, I have decided it is now wintertime, and therefore it is time for our quarterly sojourn to a new "What Are You Reading?" thread. I shall lead the ceremonial parade, as we bid farewell to the midden of the old thread, heaped full of crusts and tea bags, and wend our way to our shiny new digs for the winter of 2008/2009.

As I mentioned at the tail end of our last exciting edition of the What Are You Reading thread (Fall 2008 is on it's way so please be kind to tell us what you read), what I am reading is: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.

How's with you, eh?

Still with Infinite Jest, alas. Up to p. 310 and gaining speed.

Well, as it's winter, there's absolutely no doubt that The Collected Ghost Stories of MR James will be making an appearance at some point - I sometimes feel ashamed at how many times I've read these. But for the moment I'm flicking through Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come by Norman Cohn. It's a sort of a... um, prequel to his excellent Pursuit of the Millennium. Of course it isn't that - but it deals with the emergence of apocalyptic faith at the beginning of religious history (Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Zoroastrian and so forth), rather than its expressions in Medieval period.

Something about the tone (I wouldn't know enough to criticise it less obliquely) makes me feel he is on rather less certain ground with this volume - some his arguments seem rather speculative, diffuse. It's interesting enough however for one, such as myself, who knows relatively little about the subject matter.

shantaram - gregory david roberts
a death in vienna - frank tallis
black mass - dick lehr and gerard o'neill

'Master and Margarita' is a wonderful book: one of my favourites.

Am now reading Thornton Wilder's 'The Ides of March'. Before reading anything of his, I'd always assumed, based on bits of 'Our Town' seen performed as a school play in wholesome US movies, that he would be saccharine and irritating. In fact, this novel is steely and clever and politically/philosophically charged: it's all in the form of letters and diaries, and about the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar and also about various manoueverings in the Roman aristocracy of the time. Great stuff.

Sorry about the damn apostrophe in the thread title. I had no idea it would do that idiotic thing. Now we are stuck with it for months, unless a moderator uncontracts the mess into "Winter is". J' regret.

Penelope Fitzgerald, Charlotte Mew and Her Friends
Robert Ferguson, The Short Sharp Life of T. E. Hulme
Lucinda Hawksley, Lizzie Siddal

Although the philosophizing hard man Hulme and the Romantically wasting away Siddal were about as dissimilar as two English people can get, they are at three degrees of separation via Fitzgerald's book. At one point Charlotte is being shown a strand from Lizzie's mane, and at another point in Ferguson, Hulme is trying to seduce Mew's loyal friend Alida Klementaski at the Poetry Bookshop.

the garden of last days - andre dubus III
a spot of bother - mark haddon (one scene in the early part of the book had me smothering giggles on the train home yesterday; my eyes were watering from the effort)
the sparrow - mary doria russell
the children of god - mary doria russell
the book shop - penelope fitzgerald (i read this on ILB's recommendation - tbh i didn't love it... the narrative structure was kind of a surprise to me and left me feeling unsatisfied)

just started Tristram Shandy, and I must admit, it's even more rambling and digressive than its reputation led me to expect. but in a good way, of course.

i've got a few hundred pages left in 2666, i just haven't had much time to read. just want to finish it before '09.

Only got time for work stuff:

Adorno - 'Commitment'
Adorno & Horkheimer - Dialectic of Enlightenment
Derrida - Writing & Difference
Derrida - 'The Law of Genre'
Derrida - The Monolingualism of the Other
B.S. Johnson - House Mother Normal (again!)

And a fair few other essays and bits.

Read most of The Broken Word by Adam Foulds - long-ish poem up for the Whitbread/Costa prize, good not great. Strong narrative, not enough local flash or interest for me. Too storyish.
Got Sean Borodale's Notes for an Atlas from the library. Long poem, more or less the opposite of The Broken Word - it's a long list of things noticed while walking round London, not sure how much more there is to it. Interesting, yes, don't know if I'll last 300+ pages.
Lucian's Life of Alexander the False Prophet. Great fun. Religious fraud in 2nd century Greece. Glycon, the snake god that Alan Moore worships, starts off here, which is why I thought I'd read it.
TJ Binyon's life of Pushkin. Also great fun.

emil.y i want your job

myself i have been bogged down in umpteen books, including but not restricted to robert fisk's the great war for civilisation: the conquest of the middle east and emma for, like, weeks now. in the past couple days i have read the terrible/great death note spinoff novel (bought it as a present for someone) and paul beatty's new one, which i am enjoying far too much, although i suppose the argument could be made that it doesn't really amount to more than a sort of angry terry pratchett of free jazz

a terrymiad, perhaps

I've just finished " The Northern Clemency" by Philip Hensher. It's very long and not terribly good, but I enjoyed it nevertheless - purely because of its subject matter, the history of two relatively ordinary lower-middle-class families in the North of England through the 70s to (more or less) now, with the emphasis on the earlier decades when the younger characters are growing up. There's not enough good, or even goodish, fiction about people who look, sound and feel like the kind of unremarkable people I grew up with, no doubt because that kind of ordinariness isn't what most people want in novels. It might appeal to anyone who liked "Black Swan Green" or "The Rotters Club", although it's a little too flatulent, and perhaps too detached and self-regarding, to be as good as either of those; reading it made me think that Hensher would be much harder to like personally than Coe or Mitchell.

Hensher does sometimes write enjoyably rude book reviews, though (the best being one that finished along the lines of "On this showing, X couldn't even write 'bum' on a wall.")

Am reading Sean O'Faolain's 'The Heat of the Sun and Other Stories', which is all kinds of great. Why have I not read him before? Why is he completely OP, as far as I can see?

Also read a brilliant play, 'Tales from Hollywood', by Christopher Hampton, about emigre German writers working in Hollywood during WW2 (Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Brecht, etc): very funny, sad. Want to see it performed, but the thing about living in Australia's fifth-biggest city, even if it foolishly claims to be the country's arts capital, is you tend not to see too many great plays.

[Makes warding-off sign of cross at emil.y]

James Morrison - Would that be Victoria?

No, South Australia--for a brief period in the 1970s we had a VERY pro-arts, left-wing gay state premier, and we've been kidding ourselves that we've been national leaders in the arts ever since.

Let's Pretend - 37 stories about (in)fidelity
The Piano Shop on the Left Bank - Thad Carhart
The Snow Traveller - Charlie English

Recently got Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago (Vols. I and II).

Think I'll clear my feet before I start on them though!

Primo Levi - The Periodic Table

I kind of wish I'd read this when I still could have taken chemistry classes.

huxley - brave new world
tartt - the secret history
dostoevsky - the idiot
absolute winter warmers!

I've settled for this lot as my Christmas-reads:
Thomas Pynchon - Against the Day
H.L. Mencken - A Mencken Chrestomathy
J.F. Powers - The Collected Stories

I haven't settled properly on my Christmas reads yet (unless Outrun 2 on the Xbox counts as a book), but like Woof have been reading The Broken Word by Adam Foulds. I think I probably enjoyed it rather more than Woof - I don't particularly mind narrative story poetry anyway - it can sink into moribund sounding language at times and at other times the narrative and poetic language seem at odds leading to a feeling of redundant richness or unpoetic haste.

However I thoroughly enjoyed the section DINNER 1, which starts with the appealing formulation 'Frank was dead and he was very tired.'

Local colour was definitely slightly weak. I thought it was quite successful in its portayal of mental and physical evisceration throughout - although perhaps without enough of a sense of violence in the actual scenes of violence.

About 50 pages into 2666 and I think it's cool. (Some other books read since my last list. I just don't have the info. handy.)

i have decideed to read only comic books for the rest of the year. i will start out 2009 with some black humor:

-Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
-Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust
-Louis Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night
-Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & (maybe) The Day of the Locust
-Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge
-Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
-William Faulkner, These 13 (reconstructed from my copy of Collected Stories)

then just maybe I'll start back on The Portable Conrad, after which I plan on reading some anthology about mental illness, then the U.S.A. trilogy, some Balzac, and hopefully Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet (the Dos Passos and Robbe Grillet will all be loaners from the public library of course)

(also Gamaliel the collected ghost stories of MR James sounds terrific, I hope to be able to read that a little later on this winter...

+ )

-Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
-Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust
-Louis Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night
-Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & (maybe) The Day of the Locust
-Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge
-Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark
-William Faulkner, These 13 (reconstructed from my copy of Collected Stories)

With the exception of the last (I just can't get into Faulkner: it's like trying to read a bowl of slurry), you've got some excellent, excellent books there.

Just read...

Alan Ayckbourn: Three Plays - good stuff
David Bowker: How to be Bad - really wanted to like this (it's about a 2nd-hand bookseller who specialises in first-edition bloke-lit a la Nick Hornby and who ends up becoming a multiple murderer to get a girl), but it wasn't as clever or as funny as it (and the blurbs) thought it was.

reading millhauser's dangerous laughter collection. not really loving it.

last night I dreamt I read Infinite Jest cover-to-cover in a single day. I am not sure what this means.

Only in your dreams, fella. Only in your dreams.

at first i didn't get the vital "i dreamt" clue there, and was quite scared of you

hemingway, the sun also rises
wodehouse, the inimitable jeeves
robert caro, means of ascent

I did finish Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene (part of my Dalkey Archive holiday sale purchase) this afternoon, after starting it last night; but being that it is roughly 1/10th the length of Infinite Jest, this is a rather unremarkable accomplishment.

lolz you just need to learn how to read 10x faster that's all

continuing on the "confused dying old man" theme, I sat down this afternoon and read Gaddis's Agapē Agape -- which, incidentally, was also the book sitting next to Man in the Holocene on my alphabetically-arranged shelves, although I didn't realize that until I was finished and I went to put it back.

I am not sure yet what I think of it.

J.M.G. Le Clézio's 'Le chercheur d'or'.

Is that one in English yet? Is it as bad as The Giants?

I finished The Master and Margarita a couple of nights ago. I quite enjoyed it. Tales of the supernatural can be very liberating for the right author and Bulgakov kept all the elements of politics, religion and social satire firmly subservient to the larger story of Satan visiting Moscow. Juicy stuff, understandingly handled. I thank ILB for bringing this title to my attention a couple of years ago.

I haven't settled on my next book. Under consideration are Infinite Jest and Pale Fire, or else some trifling light entertainment like a Walter Mosley novel. In the meantime I've been fooling around with reading Bede's History of the English Church and People. One learns so many odd things from such books, they are really very interesting.

John McPhee, The Crofter and the Laird

Finishing:

Gilbert Sorrentino - Mulligan's Stew. Reading the thread on him (well, all three threads on him) and I found it a compulsive read while also finding not as funny as he thinks he is yet its probably the best novel about a failed novel I've read (not that I've read many or know of many). But the lack of funnies could be intentional (Lamont is such a 'failure' or whatever)...who knows I'm trapped in meta about the lit 'scene', and maybe that is the problem...

Harry Matthews - Cigarettes. Really great so far, can't wait to check out some more by him. Its gonna be my new year resolution and I don't make any.

A few short stories by Cortazar. Most bizarrely under-discussed author on ILX (not even a thread)? Have I said this before? Thanks to the now much improved search engine I can't find much beyond bits about him on a Murakami thread, which is almost an insult!

he's been discussed, bcz i'm pretty sure i first heard about 62 and hopscotch (which has recently moved back into my 'reading this soon, honestly' queue) here. never really got through him much, probably bcz i resented him for not being borges.

i got a copy of the savage detectives for christmas. yup, i am behind the times. so far i am mostly surprised at the amount of sex. it should be called the sexy detectives

this reminds me i've been meaning to read cigarettes and singular pleasures for ages, actually.

The search doesn't really reveal a thread about Cortazar (apart from an unanswered one on the 'I Rate Everything' board). I'd say I get as much out of him as Borges or any short story writer.

Gotta read Singular Pleasures.

Oh, and I also read Alexander Trocchi - Cain's book.

I started reading Infinite Jest last night. It appears to fall into the Walt Whitman / Thomas Wolfe / Henry Miller School of All-Embracing Word-Drunk Authorship. A fine old American tradition, but it remains to be seen if I can preserve enough momentum to ski past the uphill stretches.

Perhaps this belongs in ILC, but currently reading Neil Gaiman's update of Jack Kirby's Eternals.

i quite like the number of folks reading Infinite Jest, it's my fav book ever, probably

im reading:

When the shooting stops - ralph rosenabum
Our Gang - Philip Roth
& still 2666 - im bogged down in the murder section

Bernard Malamud: The Assistant - strange and wonderful (and sadly OP)

I've had a major case of reader's block for some time, but sat and read 140 pages of In Europe by Geert Mak on Christmas day. It's quite enjoyable, tracing the 20th century chronologically city-by-city as the author travelled around Europe. What I like about it is that it's filled with facts and little sketches, but the author doesn't necessarily take the most obvious angle - the London 1913 chapter is mostly about suffragettes rather than militarism or empire, for example - which makes the train wreck of all these historical currents in 1914 quite poignant

-Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
-Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust
-Louis Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night
-Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & (maybe) The Day of the Locust
-Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge
-Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark

(...)you've got some excellent, excellent books there.

apart from the Flannery O'Connor (who is up on my top 3 favourite writers list), this is the rough list of books that inspired Joseph Heller to turn away from the Hemingwayesque realism that was his early mode and start writing in the more surreal and comedic tone of Catch-22.

hey congrats on the move! and the store!!

can't say I want to read The Kindly Ones but this review makes it sound like more than pissing-on-the holocaust-from-a-great-height/

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22452

congratz on the store, scott! you are living my dream! :) :) :)

Felt a bit all over the place with reading recently, can't settle. Started The Savage Detectives, was enjoying it, but put it down and not compelled to pick it up. Enjoying a trip to the Seventeenth Century - Clarendon's History of the Rebellion, and Hobbes's Leviathan. Reading through Peter Porter's collected poems - could swear I used to really enjoy him, but finding him a bit flat right now.
Have taken most pleasure from starting JH Carr's A Month in the Country.
I'm a little curious about The Kindly Ones. Odd to see an author who aligns himself with all the Bs (Beckett, Blanchot, Bataille, not so sure about Bernhard, maybe only French Bs) getting solid hype from the big-house publicity machine. That said, I most likely won't read it. I'm not great with long novels.

JL Carr that is. You'd think I could do him courtesy of getting his name right. Introduction by Michael Holroyd also makes me want to get hold of Carr's chapbooks and maps

joan didion - after henry
jeffrey steingarten - the man who ate everything
elaine dundy - the dud avocado

I suspect Scott will stop reading books altogether: that's what being surrounded by a product you love does to you. Hyperbole, I know, but I'm disinterested in jewellery as a result of being around it on a daily basis. Yes, I know, not a comparison. :-)

I've worked in a bookstore off and on for a while now, and I read more when I'm working at the store. But the books I read differ: newer stuff when bookselling (mostly arc's), when not a bookseller, I reread a lot of my favorites.

(thanx Pinefox, I'd seen the McCullers thread, but don't know how much more I have to say about here--about to read Reflections In A Golden Eye, which will exhaust my library's stash)(anybody read her non-standards,like Clock Without Hands, or the memoir she was working on at the end?) Stevie, speaking of your non-Freudian, non-Christian taste for Gothic, you might want to check Maureen Corrigan's Don't Bother Me, I'm Reading. As a Boomer, post-Vatican II Catholic and feminist, she's got a lot of tips on and relish for some pretty twisted stuff, which she presents very vividly.

that's great scott, good luck

thanks, you guys! it's my great mid-life adventure. okay, i'm 40, so maybe these days that's young to have a mid-life adventure. and, um, i read somewhere about the economy slowing down a tad...

but timing aside, my scheme is to try and make my rent and expenses by selling pricey records on ebay (my rent is pretty cheap) and keeping the store full of cheap cool stuff for browsers.

also, i'm gonna try and get some freelance work again for extra money. i stopped writing for money here cuz my custodian job + 2 children just left me with no energy whatsover. i'll be writing for Decibel Magazine again! i'm excited about that. i was bummed to leave their fold last year.

we are moving to Greenfield, which is 20 minutes from Northhampton and close to Amherst and Vermont. that's where my store will be. by the way, there is an EXCELLENT used book store off of main street in Greenfield. one huge floor and a full basement. and everything priced cheap. i bought the crazy 4 book tetralogy by robert nichols there that new directions put out. cheap too for all four paperbacks. they have a very cool sci-fi paperback section. anyone ever read the nichols books? *Daily Lives in Nghsi-Altai* is the title of the whole series. kinda hippie. all about this mythical asian land and the westerners who go there to document the lives of the natives. anyway, cool bookstore! if you are ever in that neck of the woods.

also near me is the whately antiquarian book store in south deerfield which is this HUUUUUUUUGE crazy building filled with books and catacomb-like basements and just a whole lot of fun to browse around if you dig old books. people sell stuff on consignment there, so they are always filling their shelves with oddities. you could spend a day or two in there easy. more for the fan of the oddball and the old.

just about to finish up denis johnson's tree of smoke. thoroughly enjoying it, though after a nice long buildup, it seems to be fizzling a bit in the last 100 pages. we'll see.

Skot, are you gonna be anywhere near Coley etc--?

I skimmed through the Bliss Broyard book, Mark, but having already read the Skip Gates article I was a little disappointed.

i am going to read the kindly ones, although by this i mean the anthony powell novel.

i found a library slip for a book called 'the big fix' by roger simon. i think i read this in february, but could not remember doing so by the end of the month.

Best of luck to Scott in his adventure. I'm sure this book store of yours will be all pilgrimage like to plenty of ILB people in years to come!

That NYB article makes me want to read Blanchot. I tried to get my library to buy a copy of Death Sentence, but no, they wouldn't do it *sigh* The obituary in the Guardian makes him out to be a really fascinating figure. xp

Good luck, Scott!

Can someone recommend the next Walker Percy novel I should read after The Moviegoer? I've got Love in the Ruins and The Last Gentleman in my library queue.

I have Clock Without Hands, Dow.

Scott S's store is in a nice part of the world! I used to love going to Northampton, MA.

I'm not really planning on reading more ZS after this one, but that's not because I don't like it. It's actually astoundingly good compared to her first novel - astoundingly, miraculously, because 5 years (2000 / 2005), or even more, if you want to push WT back into the 1990s, doesn't seem like enough time to have evolved so much. But she really did.

Then again I'm still only less than 50% through it, having had to stop for other things; quite possibly it goes downhill.

I really want to read WATCHMEN again. It's become a perpetually deferred treat.

The Last Gentleman, Alfred. That and The Moviegoer are the stone classics, all the other novels have some problems. Maybe after those two read some of the non-fiction, like the linguistics essays about Helen Keller. Then maybe the bio Pilgrims In The Ruins.

Robert Walser The Assistant (finally).

Finished Franzen's Strong Motion, out of curiosity, as I've been enjoying his essays. Still unable to shake the DFW thing, so am re-reading Consider the Lobster, while anxiously waiting for my copy of TNY to arrive in the post, any day now, but who knows how long it takes to get to Melbourne. Also looking at John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, as well as Schopenhauer's Essays and Aphorisms, which are a hoot "A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten."

I bought some good (i hope) books last weekend;
Inimitable Jeeves - Wodehouse
A time of gifts - Patrick Leigh Fermour
Les Grand Meaulnes - Alain-Fournier
The Boat - Nam Le

think i'll read the wodehouse first. Haven't read anything funny in a good while

If you need light-hearted comedy, avoid 'The Boat'. It's a great collection, but the opening story has pretty gut-churning My Lai massacre descriptions.

Recently or now read(ing)....

John Bowen: The Birdcage
Clare Wigfall: The Loudest Sound and Nothing
Eli Gottlieb: Now You See Him (a weirdly typeset book, full of kerning errors, so that every page has a least half-a-dozen sentences with wei rd gap s li ke thi s. Ve ry distr acting.

xyzzzz__, could you to persuade the library to order a copy of The Station Hill Blanchot Reader? A lot (most?) of his fiction is in there, including Death Sentence, along with a bit of criticism (The other Blanchot Reader, the one from Blackwell, is better for the criticism, which I like better than the fiction, tbh, tho' Death Sentence is intense) and it's pretty reasonably priced for a comprehensive selection (this might be bit skewed in my memory - there were a lot of remainder copies on Amazon uk when I bought it).
(Oh, and, yes, congratulations & good luck Scott! I may never be in your part of America, but if I am, will be sure to smash my baggage allowance via your shop)

I will get them on it.

After all I got them to buy a Jean Ricardou book, no reason why they couldn't get me some Blanchot.

read colson whitehead's "sag harbor" over the weekend and started "a confederacy of dunces". i'm still halfway through "the devil in the white city"...i enjoy it when i'm reading it but it never entices me to pick it up.

how is the whitehead? and how come you have a copy already, huh?

Thansk for the recommendation, James. The Last Gentleman is a drag so far, though: lots – too much – dialogue.

Looking forward to reading Scott's recommendations, but until that moment, I've just picked up 1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare by James Shapiro. Bonus points for astutely imaginative reconstructions of the Elizabethan world, and also for practical interpretations of the plays according to context.

Minus points for rather odd lapses, such as when he puts down lapses in stage directions to Shakespeare's psychology rather than transcribers or setters. Also, I never feel ENTIRELY comfortable with these sorts of imaginative reconstructions, good though this one undoubtedly is, preferring lotsa footnotes and scholarly structures. My bad I think, this.

Also picked up Afternoon Men by Anthony Powell again. It was hanging round my grilfiend's (as I had bought it for her). Very funny with the feeling of melancholy that characterizes his early comic stuff, pretty much of all of which is brilliant.

Just starting Underworld by DeLillo.

Collected Essays by Graham Greene. Wasn't expecting it to be almost all book reviews, which makes it a bit monotonous at times. And he's sort of almost too reasonable at times - so many essays go "well, this guy has this and this and this going for him, but he is really bad at this" (tendency to end on the negative rather than the positive, too.) But I'm still having a good time, hard to dislike Greene.

bouncing back and forth between The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 and Paddy Whacked - T.J. English, about irish gangsters. Getting my true crime itch scratched i guess.

Anthony Powell's pre-Dance comic novels are wonderful.
I love the Graham Greene essay on Beatrix Potter (and if you can find 'Mornings in the Dark', his collected film writing, it's great too).

Reading/read...

Andre Malraux: The Way of the Kings
Colette: The Pure and the Impure

how is the whitehead? and how come you have a copy already, huh?

― thomp, Wednesday, March 11, 2009 12:18 PM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i'm connected, yo. :D

i revived this thread for it, but i really enjoyed it. i think it's very direct and earnest for him, but i've only read 'the intuitionist' so maybe it's not as atypical as i think.

"Just starting Underworld by DeLillo."

fantastic book! middle dragged a bit but well worth reading. i loved it.

finished dr jekyll and mr hyde which i enjoyed immensely. ollala (?) was a good story as well. now off to read another cornwell book. the body farm.

John Stewart Collis: The Worm Forgives the Plough

I seem to have lost my copy of L.A. Confidential.

In my grief I wandered into the Half Price and picked up Lethem's Amnesia Moon & something called Thinks... by David Lodge.

JM, what is that?

Alimosina: Collis worked on an English farm during WW2, and it's a collection of his observations on nature, the land, etc--actually 2 books together, the second of which is especially good at communicating the amazing-ness of everyday natural life viewed with a fresh eye.

riding toward everywhere by william t. vollman

Finally finished Madame Bovary and appreciated it much more than I thought I would. It seemed ridiculously modern and written much later than it was, and although much of that may have been the effect of the translator it's still hard to believe it was written so long before Freud, etc.

Just started The Rape of Nanking. The preface alone has me utterly depressed. Should be fun!

I'm also reading an Agatha Christie (the ABC Murders) which I read back in high school but whose plot & solution I've forgotten so it doesn't feel like a re-read.

I'm a little giddy.

Just got a copy of Oscar Casares's first novel Amigoland. His short story collection, Brownsville, is one of the best collections I've ever read. As Ice Cube would say, today was a good day.

Greene's Collected Essays incl re-evaluating his early discoveries of books, and excavating/salvaging works from deep in British literature (obscure to me anyway)going with passing references to world going down tubes in 30s, so urge to rescue/counterbalance seems subtly evident, but yeah, he doesn't hesitate to go negative, and my copy indicates that Beatrix Potter was not amused by his celebration. Pinefox, have you read yr copy of Clock Without Hands, and if so, what did you think?

I can't remember if it's Collected Essays or Mornings in the Dark that has Greene's great movie review where he basically accused Shirley Temple's movie producers as using her as paedophile-bait, and got sued for it.

I just finished Sam Taylor's 'The Island at the End of the World', and while I can't really recommend it to anyone, I really want someone else to read it so I can have someone to moan to about the massive multiple gaping logic holes in it. Nice cover, though:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0571240518.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Just read Gabriel Josipovici's essay review on Volume 1 of Beckett's letters. Josipovici can go repetitively fuck heself with a long eclectic thing of doubtful provenance,(nothing to do with the review - just general dislike) but the letters sound great.

In the TLS I meant to say.

Katherine Mansfield: Letters & Journals -- a very interesting selection, but not very helpfully edited (obscure references and persons remain unexplained throughout)

James, thanks for the advice! Lack of movie related writing was my main disappointment wrt this anthology. Did end up enjoying it immensley though, especially the stuff about popes and priests (don't often read actively catholic writers, I guess, was nice to get a small window into that world.)

going with passing references to world going down tubes in 30s

Haha yeah dow, that next to last essay written in 1940 where he talks about how people are saying that man gets used to anything and he's like "well, NO, we just get used to THIS stuff because we knew it was gonna happen anyway, it was inevitable"? Wow. I'd love to know where - if at all - that was actually published, not exactly a call to buy war bonds.

Now reading Yukio Mishima's Temple Of The Golden Pavillion

Perhaps the time has come to make the seasonal change of digs for this thread. You know, spring cleaning and all that jazz. Since I screwed up the thread title last time with a fistful of those &apos doohickeys, maybe someone else might care to do the honors this time. Øystein? Jaq? Scott?

Done: Spring in the NORTH, Autumn in the SOUTH, it matters not, what are you READING?