Seasons always change but some threads still remains - so what are you reading autunm 2010?

Flanders Road - Claude Simon

re-reading the Lipsky/DFW book

Still hopping between Among The Believers and The Last Samurai.

Still trying to finish Liver - Will Self.
Next will be The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain de Botton.

Jeezo Andy - I speak from a position of ignorance, but by names & titles alone I can hardly imagine a less appealing pair of books.

Flanders Road - Claude Simon

― Zeno, Monday, September 20, 2010 4:34 PM (Yesterday)

Ooh, let me know how this is. I read The Trolley last year and really enjoyed the Proustian level of detail and flowing, lyrical sentences. I have The Acacia and Triptych on my shelf waiting to be read.

I'm still reading the Tolstoy novellas, finished Family Happiness and Ivan Ilych, now into The Kreutzer Sonata.

"enjoyed the Proustian level of detail and flowing, lyrical sentences"

you will enjoy it, cause it's more or less an otm descruption of Flanders Road.
i'd say he took Proust technique and tried to make it a bit different, with hyper realism details, sentences within sentences, and other variations that are more post modern than modern.

it's a slow read which goes around in circles, but it's great.

the last samurai & the privileges

James Kennaway: Tunes of Glory

Not seeing any leaves on the line you know :-) Apparently its going to be 25 degrees today.

Reading bits of Last Samurai and I'll get onto A Minor Apocalypse by Tadeusz Konwicki.

has anyone else read the privileges? kinda interested in talking abt it...

I don't even know what it is. Give it a thread and see what turns up, I say. xyzzzz__'s musings on the prospective ILF have made me realise that we could handle many more satellite threads on here.

In rural Ireland. Reading a lot, writing a bit.

God's Englishman and Liberty against the Law by Christopher Hill
Donne's Sermons, ancient multi-vol edition
Echo Round His Bones - Tom Disch
Gardiner's History of the Commonwealth/Protectorate
Walton's Lives
Thom Gunn's poems (not getting into these)

Think I'll read some Chandler or Dick tonight, head's a bit a full of Civil War stuff.

Read about half of 2666. 's ok. Don't think I'll bother myself finishing it.

Just finished "The End of The Story" by Lydia Davis, which totally blew me away.

And I just started this:

http://images.indiebound.com/942/035/9780674035942.jpg

Trying to bone up on some literary history without putting myself to sleep. Turns out that this is more of a cultural history, but it still seems worth a shot. Anyone have any suggestions for Lit history books (but not anthologies a la Norton)? They can be British, American, Renaissance, Medieval ... whatever really.

Started Isaac Bashevis Singer's 'The Magician of Lublin' on the bus to work this morning. Really loving it so far.

Pretty curious and excited about Sheila Heti's new book, only coming out in Canada :-<.

Alan Hobsbawn - Age of Capital
James Baldwin - Collected Essays

romeo, i love the german version of that book (which—the american one—is sitting unopened on my desk). the french one is kind of overawed by post-structuralist theory; the german one seems more balanced, focused on particulars.

i also like alastair fowler's history of english literature, particularly because his interest in genre and form leads him to plot his history in terms of significant formal innovations and less-innovative-but-still-workaday forms, which for me is a lot more revealing than lots of literary history.

has anyone else read the privileges? kinda interested in talking abt it...

i started a thread on ilb about it! to which absolutely no one else posted... :/ hell i loved the book so much i mailed a copy to erstwhile ilx poster thomp just so someone else i know could read it but i dont think he received it. it really is fantastic - the best new book ive read all year, i think.

lol i misspelled the book title in the thread title: "because this some end-times shit too, what we're doing" a thread for jonathan dee's THE PRIVLEGES

j., thanks for the tips. I'll definitely check out the Fowler and the German one.

Coincidentally, just as I learn about Dalkey Archive Press from the thread here, I find that the books on top of my reading list are published by them:
Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature
Harry Mathews- The Conversions

Then (finally) Inherent Vice.

Ismael - yeah I got to thinking that on ILB there are three constant 9or as I called it, driver) threads: the reading, the books we've bought thread, and now the contemp lit.

Thinking of other topics one could be 'I love writing' type stuff (or stuff that was discussed round the time of the ILW controversies), but that perhaps is too personal. Said all that, it was nice to read of one of yr maxims for a sentence on the summer thread, say.

More new threads on ILB would be good 99% of the time. Establishing driver threads are more difficult.

Finished the Konwicki - typed up a post on the Dalkey thread.

Read Yuri Olesha's Envy in a morning. This one has certain visions and its actually one of the best unreliable narrator novels.

I think after reading a couple of Victor Serge (yes I know he wrote in French) and Andrei Platonov novels I am finally getting into the Russian novel. That, and reading quite a few Hungarians, Poles and Czechs has been the best reading I've done all year.

i dipped back into the lipsky dfw book before lending it to someone; it's a nice one to do that with.

am split between american caesars & bellow's seize the day right now. i went to buy freedom and all the money i have in the world fell out of my pocket on the way, so i'm still waiting on that one.

I agree more threads'd be nice xp. I've got a couple of minor things I want to start myself.

Book Group is also potentially a good driver, though we should be sparing with it I think - maybe three or four of those a year would be about right, and those of us desperate to share something can all queue up for a shot.

And I Love Writing thread (or threads - an official writing group?) should be another I agree - it belongs here, and even if it's a personal thing for some folk there are always a few hanging around these parts who don't mind baring a bit of soul. We can always give LJ a poke from time to time if it comes to it.

non-xp I picked up Freedom today myself, it being an actual impulse purchase as I didn't realise it was out already and Waterstone's being kind enough to offer me it half-price. I literally veered off to the right as I was walking straight past the shop and the sign in the window caught my eye. I got chatting to the bloke at the counter, who told me an interesting thing which I shall save for said new thread as and when I get round to it.

Yeah I think the book group worked quite well. Doing a four-week schedule was an excellent format, giving it a structure, and agree it should be spared.

Writing group is perhaps a bit too formal, but since I wouldn't be contributing I shouldn't give much of an opinion on it.

Read Yuri Olesha's Envy in a morning.

Great little book! I've actually read it in 2 diffwerent translations, which is unusual for me--I bought the NYRB edition when it came out, and really dug it, and then it was also included in the Penguin 20th Century Russian Reader (an ace collecton, btw), so I read it again.

Finished the Bashevis Singer, and it was really cool. Travelling Jewish stage magician in Poland in the 1870s with a girl in every town, tempted to become a super-burglar, troubled by his religious flaws, unexpected ending; really good fun and clever.

Now starting Jonathan Raban's huge journalism collection, 'Coming Home', which is excellent so far.

I'm still (very slowly) reading The Vivisector, which I unambiguously loved for the first 200 pages or so before a distressing lurch into dissatisfaction with the whole Nance Lightfoot section. White suddenly seems utterly confused about what he's trying to do. Neither Nance nor Duffield's obsession with her remotely convince. The obvious comparison for me was Patrick Hamilton, whose male characters' erotic obsessions with "low women" are so painfully believable. Tellingly, the confusion is matched by a change in style - in the first sections White's style is a model of clarity, particularly for a writer noted for a fresh, poetic style. Suddenly there are sentences so opaque as to seem meaningless - or at least they won't yield up their meaning without much more concentrated thought than I think they deserve.

I'm still (very slowly) reading The Vivisector, which I unambiguously loved for the first 200 pages or so before a distressing lurch into dissatisfaction with the whole Nance Lightfoot section. White suddenly seems utterly confused about what he's trying to do.

Exactly my problem. I put it down at pg. 250.

Also: my problem with Riders in the Chariot. Thus, I've read four hundred pages of White, with increasing dissatisfaction.

I'm also tempted to give up, Alfred, around p 260. I'm past the Nancy bit now and hoping it picks up. But if I don't see signs of that happening soon it will be abandoned. I have a pile of books I'm keen to get to, including the new Franzen.

Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square
Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love
Greil Marcus, The Shape of Things to Come

and then it was also included in the Penguin 20th Century Russian Reader (an ace collecton, btw), so I read it again.

Was browsing through the a Penguin collecting Russian short stories last week (selected by Robert Chandler)

Been reading through more Russians: Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky - Memories of the Future. The title piece is a novella, doing much more work than a conventional time travel story (by not separating space from the story, for example) and the narratives just didn't do it for me, except for Quadraturin, like he was on conceptual overdrive and not really shaping one or two things in particular - as Borges or Lem might have done. But I'm just prepared to accept that I don't have the chops on the philosophy he was commenting on.

Finishing Zamayatin's dystopian fable We. Fun and all but it lacks any ambiguity about the Soviet project. That he was proven correct doesn't make it for striking fiction

Next: Rabindranath Tagore - The Home and the World

Recently read:
Denis Donoghue - On Eloquence
Thomas Bernhard - My Awards
Bernhard runs around being mopey and happy and buying stuff, generally thinking the awards he's getting are damn close to insults, but the money's so very nice. I didn't really understand much of the appended speeches, but I enjoyed the book nearly as much as his novels. Kinda regretted reading it over a period of several months though, as it does hang together a bit more than a collection of essays or short stories.

Currently reading:
Jennifer Egan - A Visit From the Goon Squad
Was pretty negative to this, as I don't trust novels about rock musicians etc, but it's really good.

Michael Ende - The Neverending Story
Uh, I'm trying to learn German and figured a children's book where I know most of the story would be OK. Shucks, it's not the grand story it was when I was 10! What the hell, I'll keep going. The rock-eater's name is Pjörnrachzark!

A book of Winston Churchill's WW2 speeches, which was interesting in that 1) it shows how much the quality of political speech has decayed in 60+ years, and 2) the fascinating mix of honesty and propoganda, with very few actual lies

Alan Lightman: Dance for Two -- interesting and sweet essays on science & art

And some old mental 1960s Doom Patrol comics by Arnold Drake

Representative covers: http://www.mattfraction.com/drake/drake10.jpg http://www.mattfraction.com/drake/drake19.jpg

Anyone tempted by Peter Ackroyd's The Death of King Arthur? My favourite of his fiction is still probably Hawksmoor.

Since I found out about it, I'm also kind of tempted to read Herbert Lom's Enter a Spy: The Double Life of Christopher Marlowe. Herbert Lom! Anyone read this?

erstwhile, psht

Herbert Lom!

The Doom Patrol guy is clearly four-villains-in-one: selling himself short there

Love to get hold of My Awards at some point. Good report Oystein!

Tagore - has all of these discussion of nationalism vs pacifism, and Bimala, in between the crossfire is a nicely drawn character not merely serving as a receptacle of ideas from her male companions. otoh, not enough erratic poetic prose I almost always love - thinking it would make a good film at some point (and so it has been made).

After that The Home and the World, it was Jelinek's Woman as Lovers. Classic Austrian tale of womanly humiliation, told in a kind of clinical but correctly distanced feminist computer mode (a lifestyle journalistic pretension comes in toward the end...made me laugh.) The un-sexiness of it all is truly striking - she has got the whole body as orgasm machines thing wired. Written in '75, so its in those battle lines, but still feels of today, even if that village simpleton stuff feels more left behind...

Then saw a 'Film Stars' Penguin short bk on Ingrid Bergman by David Thomson. And its just terrific on Old Hollywood and the Rossellini stuff gets a generous reading. I imagine some other hack not even touching it.

Now: Rene Crevel - Babylon.

- a bunch of Frank O'Connor short stories
- Eric Hobsbawn's Age of Empire

cora diamond, nietzsche's 'schopenhauer as educator', and i don't know what else.

I've never read one of Thomson's little film books. Good to hear they're good.

I'm still reading A Gate At The Stairs and wondering why I maybe agree with other people about it not being as good as it should be. I'm not sure I'm right to think it isn't that great.

The Third Policeman - Flann O'brien

autunm otspur

Eileen Chang: THe Fall of the Pagoda -- novelised autobiographical shenanigans about growing up in financially failing aristocratic family in Shanghai in the 1930s with the Japanese invasion going on in the background. Very good, but I did get all the Third Mistress Concubines and Fourth Masters and Fifth Sisters and Sixth Brothers somewhat muddled

Iain Crichton SMith: Consider the Lilies -- short, pretty effective novel about an old woman being chucked out of her home during the 1800s High;and clearances in Scotland

Alain Robbe-Grillet - Jealousy and In The Labyrinth

Finished Oulipo, stuck in to Coover's Gerald's Party right now. After that it's Motherless Brooklyn for my book group.

Still kind of shocked that I signed up for a book group, both in the "agh god people socializing need pills" sense and in the "oh god that is what Square Old People do" sense. But they seem OK! In any case, my next book after MB will probably be the winner of their poll. The choices, in order of votes so far, are:
Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (love it, but I haven't read it in aaages)
Bill Fitzhugh, Pest Control (no idea, maybe fun, who knows?)
Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea (got my vote)
Alasdair Gray, Poor Things (my suggestion; amazed that two people actually voted for it)
Philip Pullman, Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel

How's Jealousy going for you, corey? I had really mixed feelings about it when I read it.

hermann melville-the happy failure and other stories
frank o'hara-selected works

Eric Garnsworth: Extra Indians -- really some really good reviews of this, and I do like it, but could stand to have 50p+ shaved off

I'm a real sucker for crying at the ends of books. The two public cases I recall are The Portrait of a Lady in the library and Atonement on a bus, the latter coming against my better instinct to be angry at being emotionally played with so effectively. Last time was The Corrections, the last few pages of which took me about five minutes each to read, such a kicking did they give me. Don't even know why, really - too close to home? Certainly felt manipulated again, though.

anyway, I am currently reading Zadie Smith's On Beauty and, non-fictionally, Alberto Toscano's The Theatre of Production.

how's the toscano? I think I've read some stuff he translated, but don't really know anything about dude's own philosophizing

"I'm a real sucker for crying at the ends of books."

Good thread idea but I've never cried at the end of a book - heart is made of stone.

"(assuming you mean 2666)"

Yeah, it was 2666. Forgot this was popular.

I'm liking the Toscano a lot - basic gist is an assessment of responses to the problems Kant ran into with fitting the individuation of the organism into the critical project, looking esp. at Nietzsche, Whitehead, Peirce, Simondon and Deleuze. Only read the Kant section so far, but it was v interesting and cleared up a lot of things about Kant I'd been muddled on. He's a super-intensely dense writer, sometimes to the point of getting ugly and confusing, but for the most part it's remarkably clear considering how much he's saying in so little space. On a purely personal academic note, dude intimidates the shit out of me - like not only is he apparently extremely well-read in everything, but he's extremely well-read in everything across about five languages, and is still only 35 or so.

"The Mimic Men" by VS Naipaul

Would like to read "The Black Minutes" by Martin Solares

"I'm a real sucker for crying at the ends of books."

I remember 'Disgrace' almost killed me in this way.

yeah I've looked at that book in the library a couple of times (and probably have a pdf of it on my computer, lol arg) but never read it cuz I wasn't sure what the 'point' of it was — plus I'm still not nearly solid enough about Kant, and I know next to nothing about Whitehead, Peirce, or Simondon (the latter seems frustratingly difficult to get ahold of in translation)

("that book" = Theater of Production)

Alphonse Daudet: Artist's Wives -- short story collection about crappy women married to artists, and crappy artists married to women -- lightweight 1870s French fun

Madison and Jefferson - Andrew Burnstein
Nemesis - Philip Roth

Reading Orwell's Coming Up For Air for the first time, wonderful stuff so far. And reading an Alan Garner to my kids at bedtime which is freaking them out a bit, but they won't let me stop all the same... Missed out on him when I was little, so he's a good guy to catch up on. Might do some Russell Hoban next - The Mouse And His Child perhaps?

Shit, you really are looking to freak out your kids. LOVED Alan Garner's stuff when i was younger, they always had such a great atmosphere. Might give some of em a reread actually.

I recently read his 'Redshift', which I never read as a kid, and that was really ace. His adult stuff is pretty excelent, too, like 'Strandloper' and 'The Stone Book Quartet'

Javier Marias - While the Women are Sleeping

Just finished Vendler, The Music of What Happens.

^^^ One of my favorite volumes of crit. I love her Plath, Sexton, and O'Hara essays.

Andrew Burstein - Madison and Jefferson. One of the most intelligent political biographies I've ever read.

er, Madison and Jefferson

Nancy Mitford/Evelyn Waugh letters -- took a while to get into, and not sure I can do all 500 pages, but enjoying now

Eric Ambler: Judgment on Deltchev -- loves me some Ambler

reading Why England Lose (ty again Ismael) and The Cheese Monkeys for a light giggle and maybe the occasional bit of insight now I am halfway through the RFK bio and Ragged Trousered Philantropists. They were a bit too full on for a delicate lady like myself but i'll return next week.

"The Mimic Men" by VS Naipaul

have read this but can't remember anything about it

^^^
i find it hard to get into. i've absolutely loved the other books of his i've read but i couldn't get into this (i think 'a bend in the river' is my favorite work of contemporary fiction, endstop).

also the new marias book of short stories is very weak, but then again it covers a huge swathe of his early writing career (there is a short story in the collection that he wrote when he was 14, for example). imo he did not pick up speed until the late 80's as a major writer.

Charles Dickens - "Great Expectations"
James Woods - "How Fiction Works" (really great so far)
Susan Sontag - "On Photography"

Burroughs: Queer -- I have to admit, I think this and Junky/ie are the only books of his I actually like. I'm tempted to give The Exterminators a go for the sci-fi aspect, but my low Beat tolerance will probably end up with it abandoned

Finished 2666 - love the Arabian Nights type narration (w/ a stronger singular voice behind it) adding up to a 'total' work.

Gave me a 'last novel' feeling, too!

Gonna start on some Strindberg - Inferno/From an Occult Diary.

finding anna karenina to sag pretty badly in the middle after an amazing first couple of hundred pages

keep at it, it's worth it. the passages about levin being in love are ecstatically written. i found a.k. to be a much more 'entertaining' read than war and peace or the death of ivan ilyich.

Finished infinite jest. Oh dfw, you tease.

i loved ivan ilyich. even though AK is supposed to be his western novel, the structure is obv. quite unconventional, and i'm struggling with that, i think. Ilyich didn't have that problem for me simply because it was so short. "insights about character"/page ratio may have been higher too.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend is worth a look after you finish AJ.

Wow did I miss a lot.

Burroughs: Queer -- I have to admit, I think this and Junky/ie are the only books of his I actually like.

i think this is the way many - most? - readers secretly feel about Burroughs.

Sam Lipsyte: The Ask -- enjoying this a lot, though it's not GREAT GREAT GREAT: every character talks exactly the same way. But pretty funny

On the verge of finishing 2666.

Been reading Nixonland. Lord, it takes me back. I was 13 through most of 1968. Not old enough to have participated in the madness, but plenty old enough to know what was happening. This book gives me the willies about every 5 pages or so. Just had the dubious pleasure of reliving the assassinations of MLK and RFK coming a couple of months apart.

2666 is good. i remember there was a time prior to 2006 or so when you couldn't get people to read bolano. i used to post on a spanish-language bolano forum in english because i couldn't convince my friends to read him after i'd give them his books and i wanted to talk to someone about his work.

^^^saw the velvet underground at the factory

Am half Chilean and read all my bolaño in the original: authentic bolaño vibes.

savage detectives was translated before 2666 and it got quite a bit of hype i remember? that was the first i'd heard of him

yeah 2007 is about when he breaks - that's when the translation of The Savage Detectives comes out, articles everywhere.

About to start the winter thread btw.

jesus my last post was lame. excuse that please

to jim in glasgow - what do you make of alejandro zambra?

Burroughs: Queer -- I have to admit, I think this and Junky/ie are the only books of his I actually like. I'm tempted to give The Exterminators a go for the sci-fi aspect, but my low Beat tolerance will probably end up with it abandoned

― buildings with goats on the roof (James Morrison),

seems weird - queer has a lot more in common with naked lunch, i thought, and definitely with the yage letters (which are great! i like them way more than junky, anyway)

i still haven't gotten around to the cut-up trilogy and the pirates/sex plague trilogy, though i started the latter as a teenager and was kind of impressed by it, i guess

not very good: 'the cat inside'

Never read bonsai. Probably should get round to it.specially as it'd only take a couple hours.

kate78 -- how are you liking it? I gotta say he reminded of Konwicki a bit. Both are interested in how culture gets hijacked by politics (Konwicki is more a film guy) and then they both speak to the person reading in a very direct manner.

OK, I might have to try the Yage leters, since they seem to pretty much follow on from Queer
Naked Lunch I remember being a real slog, whereas Queer just flew by. Of course, it's only about 1/3 the length.

Lyndall Gordon - Lives Like Loaded Gun: a biography of Emily Dickinson and how her brother's adulterous relationship influenced her. Well done.

Gaddis - The Recognitions (starting for the third time)

arthur machen - 'the great god pan'

Winter thread has begun!
'1: Must have a mind of Winter; 2: Regard the frost and the boughs'. It's Winter 2010/11: What are you Reading?
(thought awkward Stevens pun title might have lured Alfred in.)
(don't want to be thread police, btw, just avoiding excruciating social embarrassment of having started winter thread, it quietly dying, someone else starting new winter thread in a month, etc etc)