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

What it says, continuing from Winter Is Here and the Time Is Right For A "Whatchoo Reading?" Thread

Robert W Chambers: The King in Yellow - mental, mostly in a good way
Peter Handke: A Sorrow Beyond Dreams - brief, sad, unsentimental memoir of his suicide mother

last May I took a class where we had to read Ulysses in a month. of course I bragged a lot about having read Ulysses, but my sacred shame is that because I was busy working on the final assignment for the class, I never actually read the last chapter. it's haunted me for 9 months now, so I decided to rectify the situation.

bliss broyard - one drop
anatole broyard - kafka was the rage

daughter bliss wrote her memoir after discovering that her late father -- NY times book reviewer anatole -- passed as white his whole life. one drop is a compelling examination of mixed race, though the author get bogged down in historical research in the book's long middle section her exploration of her family's twisted roots in new orleans is fascinating & very well written in a non-show-off-y kinda way. dad's uncompleted & posthumously published memoir is a mixed bag, starts off strong and then meanders into self-mythology. apparently reading lots of books could get you laid in NYC circa 1948. huh.

katheryn stockett - the help

not my usual fare but this is a great mainstream/commercial novel about african-american domestic servants in the south ("the help") and the white children they basically raise. set in 1964, told in three voices who are indelible characters. a page-turner I read in 1 day.

richard price - lush life

reads like a really good crime novel. though as sociology or satire I though it was a bit superficial (I don't like tom wolfe's fiction either) hate to say this confirms that I prefer Price's early (pre-Clockers) books: the wanderers, bloodbrothers ladies man, the breaks.

jf powers - morte d'urban

third of the way through and liking quite a bit despite the flood of lapsed-catholic neuroses it has unleashed.

"I prefer Price's early (pre-Clockers) books: the wanderers, bloodbrothers ladies man, the breaks."

this is me exactly. nothing ever hit me as hard as the breaks or ladies man. all of those first four books rule. i had the same problem with madison smart bell once he started writing about haiti and stuff. i really dug his early more autobio type stuff a bunch.

The Mays of Ventadorn, W.S. Merwin. I am the person this book was written for. Well, me and a few thousand others who live in the same cave. It features troubadours who do not resemble cartoon characters, a pinch of Ezra Pound, and some elaborate self-deflation. It's short.

I recently checked out a bio of Thomas Huxley from the library. It is glowering at me, but I haven't started it, yet.

Doing a lot of driving just now, and I'm right in the middle of Updike's Rabbit quadrilogy (Or is it quintilogy? My audio subscription is offering me a fifth book which I didn't know existed). It's an absolute joy.

Otherwise still plodding through In Europe by Geert Mak. Like I've said before, it's really good, but I started it on Christmas Day and I've still got a way to go

I assume the fifth book is 'Rabbit Remembered'? It's a short story collection with a novella of that title about Rabbit's family after he'd dead.

Reading Turgenev: Home of the Gentry. On a real Turgenev binge recently. He's wonderful.

Have just started Isaac Rosenfeld's Passage From Home, and am definitely really enjoying it so far. I have to review a new bio of Rosenfeld for the TLS so I'll read his collection of short stories Alpha and Omega after this. I've not read him before--has anyone here? I should probably check out the non-fiction too.

That's it xp, I'll check it out later. Seeing Ulysses up there^ made me wonder to what extent Updike is borrowing some of its tricks. It seems deliberate sometimes, e.g. Harry being a typesetter and imagining his experiences in print. But the stream-of-thoughts/memories is so much better in Updike - he is so effortless and natural, whereUlysses seems like just an exercise.

Finished: Elias Canetti - Auto-da-Fe: this IS genuinely crazy at points.

Finishing: Alejo Carpentier - Reasons of State: its a Latin American 'dictator' novel. But its not just politics, there is plenty about music on here (and checking out his bio I see he was a musicologist)

I read Carpentier's El Reino en este mundo for university a couple of years back and seem to remember enjoying it.

Currently nearing the end of Underworld by DeLillo and have started leafing through Martín Fierro. Which I'm enjoying but the archaic gauch-argentinian Spanish is a bit hard at times.

I am reading David Harvey and Kristi Maxwell.

i'm close to finishing confederacy of dunces - it's funny but just not all that compelling, which is why it's taking me AGES - and am really starting to get into eggers' 'and you shall know our velocity' (which is has real lol - actual lol - moments).

Joan Didion: Play it as it Lays -- well-written on a sentence-by-sentence level, but the central character is so passive that you don't really care much what happens. But it's very short, so no big commitment required.

pynchon - v
updike - in the beauty of lillies

both are sortof a slog right now, tbh

Alan Moore and various artists: AMERICA'S BEST COMICS - a primer

Recently: Possession A S Byatt; The Reader Bernhard Schlink; Salmon Fishing in the Yemen Paul Torday. I read the Torday not entirely of my own volition: it is quite astonishingly awful.

Now: "The Savage Detectives". I picked this up purely out of curiosity about the fuss being made of Bolano, fairly certain I wouldn't like it. I somehow got it into my head that he was going to be like Pynchon, a writer I don't care for at all. But so far (about 50 pages in) I've found it fresh and enjoyable. Whether my enthusiasm will survive 500+ pages is a different matter.

Memoirs of a Public Baby, by Philip O'Connor.

It's the story of his mostly parentless childhood and youth. I had no idea who O'Connor was, but the book cost a dollar and was jacketed in blurbs from Dorothy Parker, Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender and Anthony Powell.

It's an effort. The writing is very dense and Lawrencian. Everyone is physically hideous and everyone is morally corrupt. School is described in sentences like "Culture was done in a cryptic brio; spread like butter on stones, or tombstones on child corpses." To go on with much of this you have to know the center out of which he is writing, but there is no center, except loyalty to the impulse of the moment and hatred of anyone who would deny it. I don't know of another book not by Anais Nin in which the infantile ego is given its apologia at such detailed length. It's no surprise to learn that he lived the life of an alcoholized Peter Pan, moving from one woman to another and fathering various children whom he mostly ignored. (Or as O'Connor writes, "One has a natural right to everything that exists: one's share, in gifts or in earnings, is absolutely arbitrarily determined by economic conditions.")

Still, he was the man who hid behind the door and said boo to T. S. Eliot, which will endure.

Andrew Barrow wrote a dual biography of Quentin Crisp and Philip O'Connor.

But what of the title's Philip, and how did he link in with Quentin Crisp? Barrow describes Philip O'Connor as an alcoholic genius. The alcoholic bit I can readily believe but I shall have to take Barrow's word concerning the genius. O'Connor comes across as being unspeakably horrible - even for a genius. Naturally he had a traumatic childhood. He was abandoned by his mother, and lived with a one-legged civil servant in a hut in Surrey. As soon as he was old enough to embark on a life of scrounging, Philip moved in with a rich heiress called Jean, squandered her fortune on himself, and seemingly drove her mad. The poor woman was duly bunged in a mental hospital by Philip, who remarked, `The trouble with Jean is that her money has run out.' He then foisted himself on a beautiful woman called Maria Steiner, and after siring two children and spending her cash he crawled, like a giant, juice-sucking bug, into the life of actress Anna Wing (who later made her name as the Granny in Eastenders). Why do intelligent women put up with such vile treatment from ghastly men? It is a question as old and puzzling as passion itself. And O'Connor was a passionate man. Like so many writers whose names I won't mention in case they wreak heinous revenge on me, Philip's personal life was far more interesting than his work. His awful ways were not solely directed at women and children. Persistent begging and an evil temper tested the patience of many a friend, such as the writer David Thomson, who gave him a job interviewing people for the BBC. Philip's first interviewee was Quentin Crisp. Crisp's wit was so engaging, he was asked by a publisher to write a book - The Naked Civil Servant so O'Connor can, in a way, be said to have launched Quentin's career. O'Connor's claim to fame is Memoirs of a Public Baby, an autobiography which won lavish critical acclaim.

After ditching Anna Wing and his children, he met a wealthy American society hostess called Panna Grady. Panna `saw herself as a nurturer of genius' and became a willing recipient to O'Connor's serial sponging. She bought a rambling farmhouse in France in which she installed O'Connor and their children. Unsurprisingly, he was no nicer to his offspring than he was to anyone else. `Fuck off, you creep!' he yelled to his son who visited him from England, and then added for good measure, `Mediocrity!'

Yecch.

Still, he was the man who hid behind the door and said boo to T. S. Eliot, which will endure.

Now that's a blurb quote!

On Scott's recommendation upthread I started Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys yesterday. Exactly the thing I was after - perfect in fact.

Rather ponderous (the first chapter could easily have been half the length - surely you don't need to be told a character is 35 twice), heavy on the rural, and with an atmosphere of leaden mysticism. Main character rather a rum card. Given to long cosmic ramblings and suspicions and hyper-aware of other character's facial details.

And what's with the names JC? Wolf Solent? Darnley Otter? I'll defend a writer's choice of names as part of their credo any day, but some of these ones are quite alarming.

Also, is it going to turn into an Avengers plot? Three chapters in and it feels it might.

I just realised I've read 'Memoirs of a Public Baby', yet obviously it hadn't stayed with me.

I'm impressed. The O'Connor effect wears off -- excellent.

Seventeen things simultaneously, as is the ideal reading experience. Among them:

CULTURAL AMNESIA by Clive James - Like the bit where the Sophie Scholl essay becomes, three pages into it, a charmingly pervy old man love letter to Natalie Portman.
2666 by Some Dude - tralalalala...
THE GREAT GOD PAN by Arthur Machen

'The Great God Pan'--that some seriously mental writing.

It is. The Hill of Dreams is his most seriously out there shit I think.

This JC Powys book (Wolf Solent) I'm reading reminds me of Machen in quite a lot of ways. The same reverance for the rural and abstract worship of the female, the same cosmic speculations, and the way the mysticism often results in a certain vagueness in the writing is shared by them as well.

Finished: Max Frisch - I'm Not Stiller

Now: Viktor Shklovsky - A Sentimental Journey: Memoirs, 1917-1922. This books describes seismic events in such a dry and detached manner on the surface, but he does manage to have a v subtle way to intensify the action...

Le dérèglement du monde : Quand nos civilisations s'épuisent - Amin Maalouf

Reading Tender is the Night. Next is Gaddis' The Recognitions.

Next is Gaddis' The Recognitions.

The best of luck with that one - it's one of my white whales. Along with Melville's PIERRE.

started Drop City by t.c. boyle today. have no idea where it's going since i didn't bother reading the blurb before removing the dj and taking it to work. but already there are far too many similes.

i really want to finish you shall know our velocity but it's a valuable edition belonging to my fiance so i can't just throw it in my bag and bring it to work

Norman Collins: London Belongs to Me
Theophile Gautier: My Fantoms

ive had london belongs to me on my "to read" forever

Gaddis is one of those guys whose work I've never been able to penetrate, except for Agape Agape, which is probably one of my favorite books about mortality.

william golding - the pyramid

Last week I read The Devil in the White City. It seemed accurate, fairly interesting, and thankfully was not too overwrought (a common failing of narrative history).

The premise of the book, which sought to yoke together the stories of the primary architect of the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893 and a serial killer whose victims probably included some fairgoers, never really worked for me. The two stories chug along in parallel ruts and the author jumps from one to the other very often, but the two stories never really merge or illuminate one another. He even dabbles with a third subplot concerning a paranoid schizophrenic who assasinates the mayor of Chicago, but wisely leaves that story as nothing but a minor decoration glued to the side.

In short, it was OK and quite readable. For someone who knew nothing of the era or its characteristics, it would be a good introduction to some of the gaudier aspects of the Gilded Age.

Oh yes, the book I am currently reading is Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich. What's weird about this book is that she is writing for an audience who apparently have never worked in a minimum wage job while trying to live on their earnings.

It is hard to wrap my head around the fact that it would be news to some people that minimum wage jobs are hard, dirty, exhausting and demeaning to the worker mostly by the design of the employer, and only rarely so by the nature of the work. Equally so, that only a magician could live decently on such a pittance.

Who are the idiots who don't understand this already?

I went to a fancy private high school where Nickel and Dimed was our summer reading assignment one year (10th or 11th grade I think). of course the class discussions abounded with young republican outrage about socialist propaganda and poor people being lazy/stupid/whatever.

looking back on it now, I think the experience taught me a lot more about rich people than it did about poor people.

'London Belongs to Me' is great--not great literature by any means, but one of those 19th-century-style big fat books full of characters and local detail which really draw you in. I took it with me on a short business trip with lots of time spent on planes and in airports, so it was just the thing.

Susan Sontag -On Photography. Finally! Dunno if I'll pull through, but damn this is great. Not as fantastic as Barthes (duh!) but still a nice read.

I read that last year, stevie. It was lovely.

Still slogging through The Rape of Nanking. Interesting subject, but it is not actually that good.

Of late: Victor Serge - Birth of Our Power, as talked about on the commie bks thread.

Nathalie Sarraute - Do you Hear Them?

Now: Jean Genet - Prisoner of Love.

I really liked the Susan Sontag too--I just wish it had included some of the photographs it talked about.i read much of it on buses when I had no internet to look the pictures up with.

Having disposed of Barbara Ehrenreich, I have picked up Oblomov, by Ivan Goncharov, via the english translation prowess of Marian Schwartz (published in 2008). It was the only copy I could locate through my local library. I hope the translation does it justice.

Weird, I don't remember whether my copy of On Photography includes the photos. For some reason I think it does, but maybe that's because I looked them up on the internet...I'll have to check when I get home.

I finished The Rape of Nanking yesterday and feel like I could have gained the same level of knowledge about the incident if I had just read the Wikipedia page.

Started on Gerard Donovan's Schopenhauer's Telescope, which is already intriguing. I loved Julius Winsome and this is equally lovely. He has a thing about snow which I like.

Hans Fallada: What Now, Little Man?

How a novelist who was making fun of the Nazis in print in 1932, and whose book was filmed by Jewish film-makers, survived beyond the end of WW2, even though he stayed in Germany, is beyond me.

It's really good, btw.

finishing up 'Caliban and the Witch' by Silvia Federici.

now i shall start Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's 'Dictee.' do yall know her? imagine one of the most influential books of contemporary poetry. and then imagine its author being murdered A WEEK after its release, never able to reap what would have been massive benefits and praise.

My life feels empty because I finished Rabbit Angstrom.

Did you read 'Rabbit Remembered'?

Reading a collection of excellent HE Bates short stories, interspersed with volume 4 of the Tove Jansson 'Moomin' comic strips (yay!). Probably with more Eric Ambler to follow.

Making of the Atomic Bomb is truly an excellent read.

Carlo Gadda - The Mess on Via Merulana

"Decided on a push-myself-a-bit, hear-something-new whim to get tickets to Berg's Lulu"

Yeah I'm gonna try and go on wed 17th. I love Lulu but keep not reading that play. So that's a must.

I'd love to see 'Lulu': I've read the play(s), and really dug them.
Am reading Calvino's 'The Road to San Giovanni', autobiographical essays, just lovely. I'll get back to Ambler soon!

Oh - I am going on the 17th! I would suggest meeting, but I suspect I must extra attn to my girlfriend that evening, since she is having divided reaction - going to the opera = good, 12-tone misanthropy = not so sure.

Have been a bit distracted from my reading programme by When the Lights Go Out by Andy Beckett, a history of 70s Britain. Easy lunchtime reading - good, fast-moving, full of odd detail and written by someone - like myself - for whom the period's on the fringes of memory, so that's a congenial perspective.

i still think it's three and a half times too long. i don't care what kind of armchair ted heath had

"Oh - I am going on the 17th! I would suggest meeting, but I suspect I must extra attn to my girlfriend that evening, since she is having divided reaction - going to the opera = good, 12-tone misanthropy = not so sure."

I hear ya! Although this makes me think that a summer London ILB FAP wouldn't be a terrible idea at some point (there was one about two years ago, I think?)

If there is interest I'll get a thread going.

no, I guess that will be up next after Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi unless I feel duty bound to read nonfiction books (4) that I have accumulated. (xpost)

a summer London ILB FAP

I'm always up for a pint.

I finished the last-mentioned Dead Souls some time ago. It is my belief that this book is venerated by Russians because Gogol was entirely obsessed with capturing The Russian Soul in this book and therefore, even when he is satirizing Russia he is clearly flattering it, too.

In this translation (P&V) you could sense Gogol's vernacular fluency, but it was also pretty clear that, as a satirist, he always refrained from twisting the knife, so that the wounds he inflicted were only superficial.

It may have been fear of censors or it may have been his obvious sentimental streak, but this is satire in the same vein as The Pickwick Papers - i.e. so gentle and harmless as to become beloved by the supposedly satirized nation. Contrast with Ulysses.

I have been seriously non-reading for a while. Just newspapers and crosswords. Soon I will be taking an 18 day trip and I must decide what books to bring. I may bring Don Quixote and give it a good airing out - with a few backups in case DQ falls flat for me.

I'm reading King Dork by Frank Portman.

i read that not long ago. i was disappointed the uk edition's cover wasn't as good as this:

http://partyends.com/peblog/kingdork.jpg

also, person who is reading 'rising up and rising down', let me know how that goes plz

― thomp, Tuesday, 9 June 2009 16:17 (4 days ago) Permalink

Slow but rewarding (127 pages in).

The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary

frank portman is an acquaintance of mine

For Whom the Bell Tolls. Weird to read someone that seems like he influenced both Cormac McCarthy and James Frey.

Ian MacEwan – On Chesil Beach: minor Mac but compact, compelling.

Dexter Filkins – The Forever War: shattering & brilliant account of iraq (and afghanistan) by NY Times correspondent. not his prev published columns/

John Braine – Room At The Top: angry young classic, funny and more relevant to modern world than I might have imagined.

Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City: my wife scored an advance copy. nothing less than a literary version of a Philip K Dick novel.

Rick Perlstein - Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater & The Unmaking of the American Consensus. rise of the new right/best political history I've read since Robt Caro's last.

Kevin Mattson - What The Heck Are You Up To Mr. President: re-examining Jimmy Carter's infamous malaise speech of 1979 and surrounding events. haven't done a book review for awhile but this was so juicy I couldn't resist. currently working, fascinating so far, we'll see.

franny, is that the full-length edition?

Getting me into the David Milch Deadwood book and some Machado de Assis.

About time for a new rubric?

Starting on: Andrei Bely - Petersburg. Anyone read it? Nabokov said it was one of the three best 20th century novels, but probably even more interesting is the 1916 publication date, one year before the 'red horror'.

what were his other 2?

Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past (I think he reserved his admiration for the first 3 vols in particular)

i wuold have guessed the 1st one, not the 2nd

Joyce and Proust I would've guessed. Don't think most would've thought of Bely (or Biely), who is pretty obscure - although from what I can tell Petersburg had some success upon its publication in Russia.

franny, is that the full-length edition?

― alimosina, Saturday, 13 June 2009 15:35 (6 hours ago) Permalink

Heh, no. As appealing as it sounds I don't have time in my life or room in my purse for 3300 pages. The abridged version is very readable so far.

I thought I'd been seeing references to a book called 'Petersburg' crop up in all sorts of odd places in the last week or two and I was going to check it out, but the Biely one doesn't sound like what I was thinking of at all - I had in mind an exile revisiting the place in modern times. Must've got it mixed up with something else.

The lone Amazon customer review is a bit gushing:
"In my opinion this is consistently the greatest work of art ever created, greater than 'Tristan and Isolde', 'Ulysses', 'Moby-Dick', 'The Idiot', 'Hamlet', or any of those other works of genius which find profound patterns of beauty in extremes of human chaos. This plunges deeper into the chaos and brings up stranger, wilder, more intimate forms of beauty than any of them, and then weaves them into a more coherent whole. I suppose most people can't get past the narrator being an unreliable, disturbingly schizophrenic prat"

The synopsis also features the Nabokov quote, but with a slightly different take:

One of the four most important works of twentieth century literature

i have the first-ed unabridged 'rising up'. i'm not sure why.

Starting on: Andrei Bely - Petersburg. Anyone read it?

yah i didnt particularly like it. i read it for the nabokov connection as well tbh i think thats probably the main reason its still read today and it seemed just messy and not v. insightful. pretty sure ive argued about this on ilb before but ive also read that the english translation isnt the greatest.

The fourth would be Kafka's Metamorphosis, so I mis-remembered probably because the Kafka is a short story. The inclusion of Biely makes me think he just had to have a Russian work. Without an essay you just can't tell.

There are three translations, I think - I have the Penguin that I borrowed from the library but there is another on Pushkin press. The intro to the Penguin ed. tells me that Biely revised his 1916 edition into something that is apparently more compact and 'modernistic' in 1922.

Personally Viktor Shklovsky seems a more compelling early 20th century Russian, and his civil war memoirs bear this out.

mad xposts, glad you took my recommendation of 'the forever war', DP ^___^

Thomp - do see what you mean about When The Lights Go Out, hadn't noticed you were reading it upthread. 1/2way through, and I'd say it's about a third overweight. It is all that G2 Politics personal colour stuff, with the 'I woke early to get a train from Waterloo' journey descriptions and the reports of decor. But I just breeze through/skip that. Barely goes in, apart from that description of how the chairs were rearranged during his Heath interview, which really did seem so pointless that it's fixed in my memory, and may haunt me till I die.

And Xyzzzz__ - yes, a ILB London FAP sounds good to me. Same as Gamaliel - always on for a drink.

I read a bit of Petersburg, but fell off. Want to come back to it, but always heard that it's a major sufferer from lost in translation - that there's a lot of texture & style it's hard to get into anything like natural English (presumably, psrt of the reason for Nabokov love - there's a bit in this Languagehat post on the stylistic links between Bely-era Russians and Nabokov.)

dhalgren

for some reason i thought this sub-board was too balkanized to manage FAPing

There was a London ILB FAP once upon a time:

London ILB - FAP?

thomp - you round London? Gonna revive that thread...

As for reading I've finished Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground and Singular pleasures by Harry Mathews. Now I am going to start on Biely, although I was distracted by some Rabelais and Shakespeare (the latter told by Charles and Mary Lamb)

Got a nice birthday present from an ex - GF Watts by GK Chesterton, his monograph on the Victorian establishment and allegorical artist. Not at all valuable, but a nice first edition, pleasantly bound. An early work as well, and a brief skim suggests that like his other good early biographical studies (Browning and Stevenson) he largely avoids the didactic pomposities, entertaining as they may be, of his later stuff.

Read Joseph O'Neill (of Netherland)'s first book (having read his second'The Breezes', which was hilarious, years ago). This one, 'This is the Life', is well-written, but sort of lacking. Unlike 'The Breezes', it's easy to see how it fell out of print for almost 20 years. Very odd. Hard to explain why it's unsatisfying without giving the whole game away, though.

finally finishing up the U.S.A. trilogy by Dos Passos...it's a bit grim fersure...it seems just a tad uneven, I liked the first one, and am liking The Big Money (though I'm definitely ready to be finished) but for my money, it's 1919 which is the dark horse candidate for Great American Novel...the way most of the characters wander through WWI in their aimless, self-absorbed manner is brought into sharp relief by the single chapter devoted to Ben Compton, who is v. much my favourite character of the whole trilogy...

you really should read all three as a group though...

Ah, that's interesting - I tried Manhattan Transfer last year and couldn't get into it. I read a piece comparing him to his contemporaries, Steinbeck and Fitzgerald and so on, which argued that while they were in love with people and characters, Dos Passos cared more about crowds and movements. It struck me as not the ideal starting-point for a novelist.

Just finished Eudora Welty's first story collection. It's lucky she's such a good writer, because I never realised just how strong my prejudice is against stuff set in the South of the US. The grotesquerie, the proud stupidity, the bigotry, the poverty, the religiosity that almost every writer dwells on makes my brain want to crawl out of my head. Someone needs to be of Welty (or, even better, Flannery O'Connor) class to make me get over it.

Oh, also, I liked 'Manhattan Transfer', but I wouldn't want most books to be like it.

i loved the usa trilogy so much. read it twice years and years ago. i should do it again and see what i think now at my ripe advanced age.

Forty pages left to go, and I must say, The Big Money has grown on me quite a bit...1919 is still my favourite but turns out Dos passos still had a few tricks up his sleeves (and I kinda feel like a moron for not catching on sooner...)

I will say this, though; I have a hard timme imagining either Steinbeck or Fitzerald writing something anywhere NEAR this satisfying...the unbridled political radicalism alone is bracing and refreshing...I actually am revising my former ambivalence and am highly recommending it now, if only for the Thorstein Veblen bio in Big Money...

read 'the road to wigan pier' today. did not realise how sly and grebt that title was before i read it.

found first three of d peace's 'red riding quartet' for £1 ea.; made it through one and a half before deciding no, they were awful. (i think it was after the second narrator with no previous indications of such tendencies randomly decided on sexual assault) (also from glancing ahead it appears both narrators of the second book and the narrator of the third end their narration with variations on AND THEN I GOT KILLED)

Joseph Roth: The String of Pearls - I love Roth!

Now reading Elizabeth Stoddard: The Morgesons - very good, and weirdly modern for something published in 1862.

summer is here - who wanna start the new thread?

I've been thinking about it for a while but I don't know if I have enough ILB clout to pull it off v_v