Summer sun, something's begun, but oh, Louis Ferdinand Celine's Journey to the End of the Night - what you reading, summer 2010?

Ok, so I did it. Boredom rather than drunkeness was the cause, a worse sin imo. And usual apologies to those on the other side of the world.

So, China Mieville's The City and the City. You know, I'm not sure this is all that. The first bit isn't so bad, as you have fun guessing at all the defamiliarising lingo, working out the landscape, allowing the plot hooks to do their work.

But I've familiarised myself with the landscape now and it's all getting pretty thin. A lot of knocking on doors and going to talk to people. I think it's supposed to be noirish, but although there's a bit of weariness, there's no one single interesting character, or hard bitten element to it.

The whole divided city thing is neat, although sometimes a bit fudgy, but perhaps unsurprisingly, you're increasingly left with the feeling of a cold war thriller (investigating behind the curtain, minders with you all the time, people unwilling to talk) but without, say, a Smiley or even a Quiller or Bond.

The first person narrative is dreadfully uninteresting, apart from all the city mechanics stuff, and even that gets slightly annoying, beginning somewhat programmatic - fairly standard descriptions of East European desuetude v East European economic growth.

It's indicating quite clearly where it's going (or so it seems at the mo) and it's all feeling slightly thin and paradoxically perhaps, unimaginative.

Reminds me slightly of a children's book called Downtown (anyone remember this - I don't, I don't even remember whether it was good or not) about another New York underneath New York, or even another children's book called I think The Village Under the Pond, that motif anyway - bleeding worlds, old folk tale thing. I'll finish it - I'm a sucker for even the most basic of thrillers, but, yeah, not sure I'd hugely recommend it at the moment.

started reading The Beginning Place by Ursula K. Le Guin. it's about THE STRANGE PLACE BY THE CREEK.

this guy - a poet - brought in three boxes of books to the store and the boxes were filled with old lit journals and back issues of poetry magazine and slim volumes of verse and i've been digging into that stuff as well.

I'm about halfway into Stefan Zweig's "The World of Yesterday" - his autobiographical/political/historical memoir of the Europe of his youth and adulthood (late 19th century up to beginning of WWII). It's fascinating so far, though I'm not familiar with most of the poets, writers and artists he name-drops. But he's great on capturing the mood of an era, and the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that social mores changes.

Beg to differ about The City and The City - I really enjoyed it, thought it worked and rate it as one of his best. Mieville certainly seems to be a writer who divides people. I put off reading this one because of critical negativity, kicked myself for having done so, then realised I'd been through the same cycle with previous titles of his.

Currently working on an anthology of ghost stories by Lisa Tuttle, and Kadare's Palace of Dreams.

Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann. So far, not so good.

That people would have won any poll it was entered in - tick!

Glad I ranted about Mann's The Magic Mountain on ILE earlier in the week. Now I'm really into it, probably because of the appearance of the anarchist-like figure of Naphta as counterpoint to Settembrini. The struggle for Castorp's soul (who is a kind of mediator figure) also becomes apparent.

(That title would have won, not people..)

recently:

the lives of girls and women - alice munro. her only 'novel', but still feels like a collection of short stories. still great though.

the girl with the dragon tattoo - steig larsson. this was good but... not really getting why it's become this huge phenomenon?

babel-17 - samuel delaney. corny writing in places (why don't scifi writers get better editors???) but such incredibly fascinating, thought-provoking ideas about language and culture and identity and things. actually read this for a class a couple of years ago but am enjoying it much more this time round.

Libra by Don DeLillo - fantastic, watching his Oswald take shape is so gripping.

i have tried to read that book maybe 3 times now and never finish it. it's SO complicated! i just feel like i never have any idea what the hell is really going on, like there's so much between the lines that i just can't read.

I'm still reading Within A Budding Grove, over a month later. Not even halfway through yet, and I feel like a bit of a failure. I remember some writer said that if you take over a month to read a book, you haven't really read it. I am beginning to see what he means - I feel like I'm reading the same page over and over. And the thing is, it's good! Not just good, but amazingly good. I just can't make myself sit down and bloody read it.

Took me the end of Autumn and the whole of winter to read the whole lot. Never felt like I read it, but its a book to be re-read (like all the best ones).

One of my reading mini-projects is to, before a re-read, compile and read some of the Proustian sources: the rant against Saint-Beauve, a book or articles on the Dreyfus affair, some Chateaubriand, Saint Simon or the odd tale from the Arabian Nights.

Maybe if you have some of those you could switch for a bit...

still on kafka, finished the trial, about half-way through the castle. definitely feeling the old adage about novelists writing the same novel over and over but enjoying it anyway; it's a bit more comical than the trial, and somewhat less grim.

A few books glaring at me from my desk as if annoyed:

My Life In CIA by Harry Mathews
Swann's Way by Some Dude
Typee by Another Dude

I am giving up on this crap Anthropolgy of and American Girl (sample text: "I tried to put him out of my mind, the effortless way he had been dressed, the lazy curl of his hair, the hidden influence of his chest beneath his shirt." Emphasis mine).

I mean srsly, HIDDEN INFLUENCE OF HIS CHEST????

Dickens - Bleak House
Sam Lipsyte - The Ask

a fruity combination

Tom McCarthy's "Remainder" for me. Very interesting so far!

i iz reading zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance
it is making me want to get a motorcycle and philosophize

I am giving up on this crap Anthropolgy of and American Girl

That's a relief. was thinking about getting this, but now I can tell myself I don't need to.

How's 'The Ask'?

You really, really don't need to get this, I promise. The Ask is on my list for this summer, too.

its like ASK mania on ilx!

is the ask one of those things that's gonna end up being a ben stiller movie? not that there is anything wrong with that.

So far it's funny in a glib sort of way – a nice antidote to Bleak House when the latter gets ponderous.

Very easy to finish in an afternoon or two.

terry teachout - pops: a life of louis armstrong

compact and compelling bio by neoconservative wheezebag who actually refrains from political axe-grinding, presents a well-balanced portrait drawn largely from louis' own writing.

alice echols - hot stuff: disco and the remaking of american culture

academic study that's hobbled by its narrow focus & reliance on received ideas (IMO) best parts are echols' recounting of being a disco DJ in ann arbor - i went once to her club!

deborah blum - the poisoner's handbook

superb pop-history of the origins of forensic science in early 20th century NYC, deftly handles murder-mystery narratives and well-explained science. you bet I never thought chemistry could actually be rendered interesting.

have also recently read five crime novels by George V Higgins. He's inconsistent at best but a total original, telling stories almost exclusively through dialogue. can get bogged down but when it works, as in his taut debut The Friends of Eddie Coyle, the effect is absolutely hypnotic. can't understand why his early books arent in paperback?

you bet I never thought chemistry could actually be rendered interesting.

In fiction Primo Levi's Periodic table is fine.

dark side of the sun - pratchett
and countryside companion which i read tonight whilst fishing

have also recently read five crime novels by George V Higgins. He's inconsistent at best but a total original, telling stories almost exclusively through dialogue. can get bogged down but when it works, as in his taut debut The Friends of Eddie Coyle, the effect is absolutely hypnotic. can't understand why his early books arent in paperback?

Re-read The Imposters and The Friends of Eddie Coyle recently, would agree with what you say, mc. When he's on song he's probably one of the best writers of dialogue I've ever read.

gonna start Mordecai Richler's Barney's Version. I think. looks good. and funny. the friends of eddie coyle -vs- the apprenticeship of duddy kravitz! ah, the 70's.

eugene lyons - 'assignment in utopia'
david gates - 'preston falls'
douglas coupland - 'generation x'
francis wheen - 'strange days indeed'
michael foley - 'the age of absurdity'

I should read generation X again--it has been many, many years, and I wonder if it will hold up to er me not being 19 anymore.

What's the Wheen, Michael? I thought he only had one book.

I ordered The Friends of Eddie Coyle today after seeing this thread - looking forward to it.

this is a new one, i just stumbled across it when i was in the bookstore. 'strange days indeed: the golden age of paranoia', its about the craziness of the 70's (uri geller, nixon, culture of paranoia)...tries to tie it in some way with whats going on now at the end of the book but its the anecdotes like the strange grip Harold Wilson's political secretary Marcia Williams had over him that make the book tbh.

Humphrey Cobb: Paths of Glory
JM Coetzee: Waiting for the Barbarians
Justin Cronin: The Passage

The first two were excellent. The third is exhausting me. It's a 750-page book, but really a 400-page book with padding. You read the first 275 pages, and find out that was just the prologue (though I sort of appreciate the publisher not splitting it up into a trilogy to maximise their $$). The problem is the presentation of old ideas as though they're new and original, when they're not, and so don't require all this explication. I can give you the first 275 pages in a paragraph:

SPOILERS: Exotic virus from Bolivia, turns people into super-strong vampire monsters. Immoral US special ops lab, experimenting on death row prisoners. Little psychic girl also gets experimented on. Bad things happen in lab, vampires get out, world goes to hell. Little girl disappears, everyone else introduced up to this point dies.

It reminds me, by being the opposite, of John Wyndham, and how efficiently and effectively he'd set about destroying the world. By page 20 you were already in the aftermath, and you already cared about the characters, and the whole book was only 250 pages, and not a word was wasted.

Really not sure if I'm finishing this one.

I ordered The Friends of Eddie Coyle today after seeing this thread - looking forward to it.

Here's a sample.

i just got death on the installment plan recently after having read journey to the end of the night 5 years ago, might read it soon
now reading:
wilhelm reich - mass psychology of fascism (i am enjoying this but it is slow, less than 200 pp left though)
joyce carol oates - garden of earthly delights (still don't know how much i like her but i keep reading her so...)

I just read "Imperial Bedrooms" by Bret Easton Ellis. It started out very promising, but quickly devolved. I think he did a disservice to "Less Than Zero."

Now I am going back to "A Fan's Notes" by Frederick Exley, which is a wonderful read.

My Life In CIA by Harry Mathews - Clever, larky fictional memoir.

The Great Comic Book Heroes by Jules Feiffer - Why no mention of Jack Cole?

The Passage bogs down badly for a while in the middle, but the last third is better. In the end I was glad I stuck with it. It reminded me of The Stand, minus some of the humor and shock effects but with extra added dread.

Does it end with some rationality, or is it all arbitrary supernatural nonsense?

Went camping last week. I tried out Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, but set it aside after about 30 pages. Too much morbid sensitive young genius action for me to take.

I substituted Cold Comfort Farm, which seemed much more in keeping with my needs. I am afraid there are at least several dozen British in-jokes I've missed, being too dense and too American to know what's behind them. Still, it amuses me. My wife was mystified, but then she often is by my taste in literature.

Seems I'm on a kick for short texts:

Heinrich von Kleist - Amfitryon (aka Gods are jerks, part n. Another installment in my private series of "wait, wtf, I didn't expect this to be so funny!")
Annie Ernaux - La Place (Short memory about growing up in a small town, mostly describing her father and his apparent wish to become a good middle-class fellow. Really good, disappointed that only one other, even shorter, books of hers has made it to Norwegian)
Cynthia Ozick - The Shawl

Have no idea what to read now -- I'm reading a short story collection by Gro Dahle at the rate of one story a day -- first time I read her fiction, but I've enjoyed her poetry earlier, and this is turning out to be ace.
Started Alice Munro's "Open Secrets" and loved the first story, but think I'll try spreading it out over a few weeks as well.
Been picking up books all day and reading a few pages here and there, but the mood doesn't seem right for anything. Shame my all my Wodehouses are boxed up.

Independent People by Halldor Laxness

do you love it? i got halfway through a while ago and put it down because of other stuff to do but it's great. i should start over one of these days.

Barbara Pym: Jane and Prudence -- so good!

I just read "Imperial Bedrooms" by Bret Easton Ellis. It started out very promising, but quickly devolved. I think he did a disservice to "Less Than Zero."

Now I am going back to "A Fan's Notes" by Frederick Exley, which is a wonderful read.

― Virginia Plain, Thursday, July 1, 2010 9:48 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Haven't read 'Imperial Bedrooms' yet, but just read my first two Ellises 'Less Than Zero' and 'Glamorama' on a friend's recommendation. LTZ is a super visceral read - I'm not sure if I *liked* it per se but it was a punch to the gut. I'm never sure if I'm reading an indictment or just a point of view w/ Ellis but the dead-eyed nihilism of it all is too sexy for it to be wholly a condemnation. Hard to be sure, esp. in light of his later stuff that I've read.

Reading The Mysteries of Pittsburgh now b/c I need some lighter fare. Was thinking 'Illustrado' but it's only in hardcover.

Glad I ranted about Mann's The Magic Mountain on ILE earlier in the week. Now I'm really into it, probably because of the appearance of the anarchist-like figure of Naphta as counterpoint to Settembrini. The struggle for Castorp's soul (who is a kind of mediator figure) also becomes apparent.

― xyzzzz__, Saturday, June 26, 2010 10:03 PM

Excellent novel. It's been a couple of years since I read it, and I think I'm due for a reread. It seems like one of those novels, like Broch's "The Sleepwalkers" or Musil's "The Man Without Qualities" that grows with you.

Reading right now Mann's "The Confessions of Felix Krull" — his last, unfinished novel. So far it's good and a lot more obviously humorous than his other stuff.

Finished it over the weekend. Think its in that vein of Broch and Musil just not as funny as either, or as formally inventive as the Broch. Wondering how much this is to do w/the translation. Will def reread as it grew on me.

Now for Isherwood's A Single Man. Tracking what makes it into the film and what doesn't.

The film was just silly. According to Stephen Walsh's bio it's far from clear that Stravinsky was ever romantically or sexually involved with Chanel (although there were allegations). All that's beyond question is that she gave his family use of a house for a few months and was generous in financing the "Rite".

In the film she's shown as the real love of his life, both partners reflecting on what might have been as death approaches some 50 years after their putative brief-but-incandescent affair in 1921. That Stravinsky unquestionably did start an important affair in 1921 - with Vera de Bosset (who was to become the second Mrs Stravinsky and actually WAS the love of his life - is overlooked, presumably on the grounds that Vera wasn't a celebrity in her own right; also ignored is the inconvenient fact that Stravinsky was an incontinent womaniser, which might suggest the distasteful possibility that even if he did bed Chanel she was just another notch on a well-whittled bedpost.

Of course this kind of nonsense is common enough in biopics and doesn't necessarily preclude a film being entertaining, but this pretentious, absurdly langorous film certainly isn't that. It looks good in a coffee-table way and of course there's some wonderful music (although not nearly as much as there should be given the subject matter). None of this means the original novel is bad of course, although I wouldn't be too optimistic.

finished the last samurai
left my copy of ilustrado on a bus
read nicholson baker's the anthologist on a train ride; found it deeply mediocre
read two-thirds or so of remainder on two or three different buses; finding it 'major' in the way most everyone agrees it is, though not sure whether i'm liking it
reading a john dickson carr called the blind barber because i wanted to re-familiarise myself with dr. fell and it was the only one i could find, annoyed at fell being largely off-page throughout. also it just not being very good

The Blind Barber is pretty bloody awful, agreed. Endless forced humour amounting almost to hysteria about anything to do with drink, v tiresome.

Started and abandoned Matthew Sharpe's 'You Were Wrong', which is a shame, as I like the cover...

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1608191877.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Now on Hans Keilson's 'The Death of the Adversary', which is ace

has anyone read Patrick White's The Vivisector? Thoughts?

On to "The End of the Story" by Lydia Davis. Really enjoying it.
Still rambling through "Escapes" by Joy Williams (story collections take me longer, especially since I always seem to be reading a few other things concurrently).
Finished Didion's "Democracy" and Antrim's "The Afterlife." Both were good, but not great.
Currently sipping on a Fourloko and trying to get some work done. This is not going so well.

Haven't read The Vivisector but I ordered it from Amazon a couple of days ago (along with books by Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Trapido, Tibor Fischer and Peter Carey). So I expect to be reading it soon, but not sure how soon - depends if I'm in the mood for something long and literary or something lighter.

Patrick White wrote much better books than Vivisector.

Voss, for example.

here is his scores in complete-review.com

didnt read them all, but from what i did read - i agree with the list:

Patrick White's Books at the complete review:
The Aunt's Story (A-)
Big Toys (B)
The Cockatoos (B+)
The Eye of the Storm (A)
A Fringe of Leaves (B)
The Living and the Dead (B+)
Memoirs of Many in One (B)
Patrick White Speaks (C+)
Riders in the Chariot (A)
Signal Driver (B)
The Solid Mandala (A-)
Three Uneasy Pieces (A-)
The Twyborn Affair (A-)
The Vivisector (B+)
Voss (A+)

the list misses Tree Of Man which is out of print for too long, and supposed to be one of his best works.

read a couple reviews of that new book on the great migration, "the warmth of other suns." it looks great. think i'll buy that one next chance.

Me too. It sounds like excellent history.

Just bought 'Riders in the Chariot' yesterday, as part of a haul of old Penguins. THe newest 'Vivisector' cover gives me the heebie jeebies.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0143105671.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Am now reading Jessica Mitford's 'Poison Penmanship: The Gentle Art of Muckraking', and it's both excellent and a hell of a lot of fun

Riders of the Chariot is great, sometimes a little too melodramatic, but other than that - superb writing, esp. the parts about the jewish proffesor.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

xp

Well it seems I may have ordered the wrong White. The two best known ones seemed to be Vivisector and Voss and I chose Vivisector because, based on the cover blurb, the subject matter looked more likely to be congenial to me personally. A story of people trecking across the Australian outback is going to have a few inbuilt hurdles to get over before I find it enjoyable. A tale of bitchiness and egotism among arty sorts and academics OTOH seemed likely to be right up my street.

The question of congenial subject matter seems to be one that reviewers and critics prefer to sidestep, it being (arguably) irrelevant to literary merit and therefore presumably not a respectable reason for liking/disliking a novel. But it plays a huge part in what I choose to read, preferring on the whole to read about people not very different from me or people I know in situations I can readily imagine us in. This means among other things that I prefer novels about people in rich social situations to novels about people in exotic geographical situations. I can't think of many things I'd be less likely to do than go trecking in the Australian outback.

holy shit @ that vivisector cover!

read The Europeans over the weekend. found it so subtle it seemed kinda nothing. and i did find the sentences a bit jamesian. not sure whether to try another james.

next up: The Long and the Short of it: A Guide to Finance and Investment for Normally Intelligent People Who Aren't in the Industry (title + wacky neon pink cover = ew) and anna karenina

Try Washington Square, caek – better drawn characters.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9107386@N06/4992580007/

278pp in, with 140 or so still to go. Thing about this novel is, if someone said "SPOILER ALERT - all the characters turn into digital cats and fight in a climactic flying saucer battle around Mars" it would sound quite a likely outcome.

Conjunction of cover and mug in that pic make it look as though the book might be an oneiric meditation on Roman Pavlyuchenko. (Read it myself years ago and cannot remember a thing about it - other than it seemed Murakami-lite).

cheers alfred xxp

Roman's a good lad, sometimes he don't look like he's working ard enough but he's a good boy, when he gets his head down and concentrates he's one of the best finishers at the club. He's a good player, they're all good players, we're a good team. We'll have a go. We'll go out and give it a go, we'll give anyone a game.

"holy shit @ that vivisector cover!"

don't judge a book by it's cover..

I'm getting bored with The Vivisectionist, and I've 400 pages left.

Sorry to hear that. I've rarely got the appetite these days to finish long novels if I'm finding them a bit of a slog. Starting to get a bad feeling about this one and I haven't even got it yet.

Finished Elsa Morante this morning. I'd say History is one the great big books (effortlessly leading you through 700 pages worth of events). I think I came up with 'Modernist weepie' to describe (a bit like Berlin Alexanderplatz).

I don't know if I could ever re-read it, the ending was just too much (if I didn't have to work I think I would stared at the ceiling for the rest of morning), but you also understand that it couldn't be any other way.

I love how it writes about animals, how their fortunes tend to mirror their owners. How it also handles the simplicity of thought from Morante's main character to the (unnamed) narration, which must be flexible and delicate to contain (former anarchist and drug addict) Davide's complicated thoughts on the path that History takes.

Sorta started on Past Continuous by Yaakov Shabtai.

I am reading Italo Calino's "Six Memos For The Next Milennium" and "Rock/Writings" by Dan Graham. Plus this book by Sol Worth about visual anthropology and experimental film.

Here, by all means, read it online:

http://isc.temple.edu/TNE/introduction.htm

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4090/4999376848_19bdae1f98.jpg

Surprising sunshine yesterday: carried on with the book outside

today, made an extra effort on the summit and finished it. Possibly it's longer than it needed to be, but a dazzling book.

It prompted once again thoughts of Mitchell vis a vis Martin Amis. Briefly, I suppose: I've always thought of MA as the great British stylist since the war - but DM makes me wonder, makes me think MA is limited and my own judgement may have given him more credit than he deserved. DM actually seems the deeper and more daring, as well as more romantic and likeable, artist.

i seem to have begun rereading 2666 (which i hadn't yet finished in the first place).

it's only, what, a year and a half, two years since i was last reading it, but the slight change in perspective has made the spare little scenes describing the critics/academics' motivations and attempts to negotiate their way into and through their coteries and careers much sharper. bolaño's narrator's presence is more noticeable, too.

Just bought a collection of bolaño's stories. It collects together llamadas telefonicas, putas asesinas and el gaucho insufrible. Read through the first of that bunch. Great stories. Sad, fragmentary, ironic. Never read any of his short fiction before.

DM actually seems the deeper and more daring, as well as more romantic and likeable, artist.

"romantic and likeable" feels really true but "daring" less so. i finally got around to finishing the last 100 or so pages of 1000 autumns & was really idk underwhelmed. i feel like it made no real impression on me.

Having trouble with yet another White novel, Riders in the Chariot. The style is often pompous.

Just bought a collection of bolaño's stories. It collects together llamadas telefonicas, putas asesinas and el gaucho insufrible. Read through the first of that bunch. Great stories. Sad, fragmentary, ironic. Never read any of his short fiction before.

― Efraqueen Juárez (jim in glasgow), Saturday, September 18, 2010 2:40 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

his first translated short story collection, "Last Nights on Earth," is wonderful too.

Riders in the Chariot was an epic FAIL for me. I stopped at the Jewsih prof section. Never tried another Patrick White novel after that.

Really enjoying Yaakov Shabtai after a tough opening 50 pages. Mostly to do with starting straight after finishing Morante.

Now all I see is the ambition really comes through. There are three central characters and then a whole other host of characters that are connected to them, each of whom seem to last about five pages. People with their own set of successes, attachments (some would say imprisonments) to family and relationships, and most of all, their failures, all described in a galloping style. Sure I'm losing track of character but the themes are clear enough.

his first translated short story collection, "Last Nights on Earth," is wonderful too.
that story appears here, not sure what other published short fiction he has outside of these 3 collections. the three are a bit of a tome, circa 550 pages. About half way through.

reading 2 depressive books one after anotehr is hard..
xpost

"a tough opening 50 pages" = those are some of the best, most memorable pages on the book:
the going around in circles looking for the cemetary for the funeral is a metaphor for the whole book - both it's theme and style.

Patrick Dennis - 'Auntie Mame' -- maybe this was a comic masterpiece in 1955, but dated as all get-out now. I laughed more at some ads for Panda cheese on Youtube this morning than I did for the entirety of this book.

BUT am about to start Italo Svevo ' The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl', so that bodes well.

never read any svevo except for zeno

under early evening mid-September clouds I returned to

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4144/5007219293_8f2e0518cf.jpg

I like it, but think she's straining more than usual.

Picked up Eric Ambler's Epitaph for a Spy at the weekend - always interested in how an expert like Ambler weighs the competing demands of genre, descriptive detail, how he balances the need for excitement with the need for development, compression of narrative and elaboration of scene that sort of thing.

First paragraph -

I arrived in St. Gatien from Nice on Tuesday, the fourteenth of August. I was arrested at 11.45a.m. on Thursday, the sixteenth, by an agent de police and an inspector in plain clothes and taken to the Commissariat.

Hot damn. Here's a man who knows wot's o'clock it is.

Needless to say I finished it in an afternoon.

Loving the balcony, pinefox.

Around 150 pages in, I'm loving "The Vivisector". Of course, this may change.

A maxim of mine for creating flow is that every sentence should pose a question. Those two by Ambler each ask about a dozen.

A maxim of mine for creating flow is that every sentence should pose a question.

I like this. I'm quite fond of maxims of this sort tbh, makes it seem as if that job of writing a novel one day might get done if I collect enough maxims. Stuff like 'Never have a character laugh at another character's joke' (sounds odd, but the more I contemplated it, the righter it felt).

I had a load of them somewhere, you know, writer's off the cuff comments on style from interviews and the like.

"If you don't like the way a scene is going, change the weather." - I like this Eric Roth one (although he consistently bad screenplays)

I am reading:

Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow

Alan Moore - The League Of Extraordianry Gentlemen (Black Dossier) (graphic novel)

Alan Moore - The League Of Extraordianry Gentlemen (Black Dossier) (graphic novel)

My pathetic claim to fame is my presence among the acknowledgements to the book of annotations that goes with that.