'1: Must have a mind of Winter; 2: Regard the frost and the boughs'. It's Winter 2010/11: What are you Reading?

It's too cold.

I am reading:

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Really, really like this, more than almost any contemp novel for ages. In fact, having rushed through first 2/3, put it aside to save it for a moment when I'm thinking 'oh I don't know what to read'.

Thomas More by Peter Ackroyd. Not really sure why I'm reading this. My imagination seizes up before about 1600, can't get my head round the Renaissance in England; but starting to be more interested in Tudor Humanism, & this seemed an easy way in. 20pp so far, seems very Ackroyd: lots of nice details about London, cloudy Catholic mystical air hanging over things.

Shaftesbury's Characteristics. I dunno, '17th-18th Century History of Ideas'. That's a weird hobby for a man to have. Maybe I should find a new hobby.

Andrew Marvell. His satires and the Rehearsal Transpros'd. Blair Worden's article a couple of LRBs ago sent me off back to M. Brilliant, of c, but does come up a bit short against the satire greats: piecemeal, local bursts of genius, doesn't have an imaginative way to tie it all together (contrast Dryden a decade or so on). Anyway, always a pleasure, might hit the library up for a copy of the Nigel Smith biography Worden was reviewing (though I'm not really a fan of Smith, even leaving [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RACKETT_%28band%29]Rackett[/url aside.)

Also reading English Civil War history off and on. Want to "understand the arguments" re its causes, the structural v car crash running battle.

And yes, trying not to play Warcraft and Game Dev Story so I can get on with all of these bloody books that are in the world.

Night Soldiers by Alan Furst, acquired on omar little's recommendation. The reader's block is back though so it's been slow going - annoying as it should be perfect for curling up with on a snowy December evening.

Ah, Wittgenstein's Mistress, mentioned in last season's thread I think, and someone else recommended it as well. It's... ok. It's pretty good where it's good (funny in places - droll tone, perpetually undermining certainty and definition as you might expect + futuristic (I'm assuming) landscape configured out of misremembered, partially remembered information and travel routes). Not sure how the thing carries as a whole tho. But it's fairly easy to read, so I'll probably finish it.

Apart from that nothing, dismally. (so you have my heartfelt sympathies Ismael)

Am hoping this thread brings the winter harvest tho - that Egan's going on my list for sure.

http://www.bluesmuse.de/user/files/books/chip-kidd---the-cheese-monkeys.jpg
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_USzog_GOzyA/SqBpZTWAPsI/AAAAAAAAMDU/rrvJgNtpVFs/s400/lose.jpg

Should have both finished by... Monday?

The Cheese Monkeys started by pretending it was Catcher In The Rye oh woe is me i'm a teenager with thoughts but quickly turned into hilarious slapstick. When England Lose goes from 'Wow that is really interesting' to 'I don't care i'm soooooo bored' like every 30 pages.

lol typo, 'why' instead of 'when'

i wish i could read shaftesbury's 'characteristics'. i also wish the CUP version wasn't all modernized. i would rather read 'characteristicks'.

i've been reading a little of thoreau's journal. and reading a book for review—an atrociously proofed book that is also not very good.

Remember, the 19th is Do Nothing But Read Day.

Finished Strindberg's Inferno/From an Occult Diary. Thanks for the recommendation woof. Really so anguished its almost funny, but there was such an overabundance of darkness that I always checked my laughter. I finished it too quickly.

Did remind me a bit of Klaus Kinski's autobiog (w/out all the sex).

Now I'm onto Artemisa by Anna Banti. Its parts historical novel/criticism about the Italian Painter

Gonna have to get hold of that Strindberg.
Just started Julian Barnes's 'Arthur & George', which is extremely promising. And in keeping with the new thread title, I think 'Winter's Bone' is up next.

sweet, ismael. have a glass of brandy along w/it.

i wish i could read shaftesbury's 'characteristics'. i also wish the CUP version wasn't all modernized. i would rather read 'characteristicks'.

Yeah, I'm reading one of those dull-looking versions of the Robertson text. Early editions are beautiful: I think I might try to either POD a good-looking one from Google books, or see if I can find something better than this. The Liberty Fund ed looks like it might have original spelling at least; the Clarendon Press facsimile is way too much. I don't feel like I need commentary etc.

Made a point of setting aside time for it last night, with some warming coffee only alas. It's so interesting, I really shouldn't be having trouble with it. It's just a little intimidating to open books at the moment, I'm eating it up when I do settle down. There was a great passage with all the trainee spies getting up to high jinks with snow on board the train into the country that reminded me of Kerouac, the this-happened-then-this-happened youthful exuberance of it all.

Sandor Marai: Esther's Inheritance -- more Hungarian genius brilliance. In the middle of the night, learning Magyar so that I could read all the great untranslated Hungarian literature seemed like a brilliant idea. The cold light of morning has made this brilliant scheme look a little more difficult

Hungarian culture will scar you for life -- don't ask me how I know

Do Hungarians practise ritual scarification?

Infinite Jest, finally, after having read everything else DFW and putting it off for no apparent reason for the better part of a decade. I'm barely into it (just finished Hal Incandenza's meeting with the admissions office and the man waiting for the woman who said she'd come) and if it's this strong all the way through, I'm not sure what exactly I need other novels for.

i really loved it a lot. i think it's mainly very strong though it lost me slightly near the end. though whether this was just being fatigued through attrition - it being fairly long and while it flits through different registers a lot of the style is similar - or whether there is a dip in quality i don't know. it also lost me literally in that there are things that happen at the start or near the start that figure later, and i had forgotten some of them and so didn't actually totally get some things til i read something caek (iirc) linked on another thread. i drink a lot though, so, memory not the best.

i have never read any other dfw and feel slightly sad that i've started with his magnum opus, since i feel i will be having diminishing returns with anything else of his i subsequently read.

as for what i'm reading at the moment: i'm not, although i will read some Gogol short stories in the next few days while i wait for some new books my dad is bringing me back from his holiday, which are an anthology of the poems of nicanor parra - parranda larga, and the new one by mario vargas llosa - el sueno del celta (the dream of the celt). the latter is apparently about roger casement and hopefully better than vargas llosa's last book - the bad girl - which was fine, but not up to his standard, as churlish as it feels to complain that a septugenerian is no longer writing at the height of his powers.

Karel Capel - War with the Newtz. This was loads of fun. The satire only retains some of its bite, but its v funny, esp the beginning and Cap Van Toch character. The middle has that newspaper cut-ups, v 30s and good. The last chapter has a good ending.

John Dos Passos - Manhattan Transfer

Newts is great. Also try his 'The Absolute at Large', the central conceit of which is that animists are right after all, and everything in the world has a bit of the divine in it, so that when people split the atom, all of this unharnassed BELIEF and FAITH gets into the atmosphere, causing spiritual craziness all over the world.

telephone thing: there is a group readthro of infinite jest going on on tumblr at the moment -- i do not know if you would be interested but it is at (i think) subsidized2011.tumblr.com

jim in glasgow: the rest of his writing is not a step down, i think. although his first novel kind of feels like a rehearsal for jest.

i am reading bruce duffy's the world as i found it, which j. mentioned on the last thread. -- a pretty long damn novel about wittgenstein and the cambridge establishment of the early 20th century. it's peculiar: a lot of the time it goes into the slightly stilted syntax of popular biography and a lot of the time it goes, well, other places.

Currently:
three volumes of Fantagraphics' "Krazy Kat" reprints (1930s)
"A Slight Trick Of The Mind" (Sherlock Holmes as old man novel)
Cinema 1: The movement-image

Dark Descent horror anth
Jonathan D. Spence- Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci
Beckett- Molloy

I'm absolutely loving Colonel Roosevelt, the third volume of Edmund Morris' Roosevelt biography.

bruce duffy's the world as i found it, which j. mentioned on the last thread. -- a pretty long damn novel

but it's, like, the same length as all the novels i read. (or shorter.)

(make that 'start to read'.)

lately i've read a little 'bleak house'.

Nothing. Seriously — I haven't finished a book since October. u_u

OK, just finished Daniel Woodrell's 'Winter Bone', which got rave reviews and has just been made into a movie with same. But I had a hard time taking it seriously. Not that it's not well writen, but it's set in some inbred community in the Ozarks, where everybody's a murderous meth cook, and they almost all have names like 'Thump' and 'Hogjaw', and they're all so depraved and thunderingly stupid that the whole time I read it, there was a parallel parody of it writing itself in my head, and that's no way to really enjoy a good book.

Maritius Command

that's no way to really enjoy a good book.

I disagree! I think it is the best way

Ismael, how was Why England Lose in the end? Reason I ask is I was thinking of getting it as a present for an older relation - Palace fan so got him Malcolm Allison Colours of my Life autobiog a couple of years ago (great self-aggrandising read, as you might expect). Looking for some toothy analysis rather than sketchy opinion stuff really, or at least for the toothy analysis to back up toothy opinion.

Will stop saying 'toothy' now. it's giving me the heebie-jeebies..

Or failing that, any other football book you'd recommend? (Perhaps general rather than autobiography).

hey guys, i need a new novel, like, today. i just finished let the great world spin (thought it was intermittently really good) and i'll have some time to kill in chicago over the next couple days. i'm wishing for something fun but also smart and well-executed (of course), like on a david mitchell level.

You could try A Visit from the Goon Squad - it has a few recs around here (Lamp, me), it is fun, and has a nice structure that's in the Mitchell zone.

(but I dunno, I read like three or four contemporary novels a year, there are better-informed people round here)

Gamaliel: Why England Lose is patchy - some really interesting bits, interspersed with stuff that's either too obvious to be interesting, or is just blatantly made up. I reviewed it here. It's a meld between pop-economics and sports, but it lacks the rigour that you'd want from the former or the punchy approach that someone like Michael Lewis brings to the latter. It's a pleasant enough read, but I can't really recommend it.

Jonathan Wilson is definitely the best football writer that I've come across. I've read two of his books. Inverting the Pyramid is the one people rave about. It's a pretty in-depth analysis of the development of football formations across the world and through time, with loads of interesting vignettes of personalities from 30s Austria, 50s Argentina, etc - fairly novel fare, and to be honest you probably need to be a bit geeky either about tactics or (like me) about the sport globally to get the most from it. I think it would be tougher going for someone with a more regular interest in the game.

The other, The Anatomy of England is really, really superb, and going by the age of your relative and the era of the other book I'd reckon it'd be the one to go for. It's a tracing of the national team's progress and setbacks through ten carefully-chosen triumphs and humiliations across the decades. Everyone's interested in the national team, even if we all hate them really for one reason or another. My review's here. Half the games are new to me, and the other half have been treated with enough care that it feels like he's got a new angle even on the most famous matches he writes about. Most importantly, the writing and research is first-class - you can practically see the games unfolding as you read, which amazing considering footage doesn't even exist for the first couple of games he writes about (Spain-England 1929 and Italy-England 1938 iirc) and he's just pieced it together as best he could from contemporary accounts.

visit to the goon squad vs super sad true love story?

goon squad

Recently:

Confessions of a Justified Sinner, partly prompted by James and other ilxors enthusiasm. It's a miraculous novel, for sure, as astonishingly anachronistic as Tristram Shandy, with its antihero, multiple viewpoints, unreliable narrators and fascination with criminal psychology. But I found it easier to admire than love. I thought it a bit monotonous (in the original sense of the word) and for all its hostility to Calvinism it had a touch of Calvinist gloom about it.

Smile or Die (Barbara Ehrenreich). Non-fiction, an attack on the cult of Positive Thinking. Much of the pleasure I got from this was of the slightly questionable type you get from an author saying a bunch of stuff you already agree with. The argument isn't quite presented with academic rigour, but Ehrenreich is highly intelligent, well informed and on the whole remarkably fair.

I was a bit surprised she didn't mention one of the best arguments in favour of her thesis, summarisable thus:

Peoples' tendency to optimism can be measured with a reasonable degree of objectivity. You ask them to rate the probability of desirable outcomes where the exact probability is known to the tester but can't be easily calculated by the subject. A subject who continuously overrates the likelihood of positive outcomes is an optimist.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the research shows that, a tiny minority of depressives apart, we're all optimists. People regarded as negative/pessimistic are just less irrationally optimistic, ie have a slightly better grasp of reality, than the norm.

Penelope Lively - Moon Tiger. Not quite finished this and loving it so far. I don't want to tempt fate, but if the home straight is as good as the rest this will be the best novel I read in 2010. Anyone know if any of her other stuff is this good?

I'm starting Céline's Death on the Installment Plan today.

I got Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman for my birthday. It is mint. Also re-reading - and sort of breezing thru - Mason & Dixon. It is also fucking mint.

That Morton Feldman book is great. He was an arrogant bastard, but he was dead on when it came to art.

his politics and his attitude to Art as a whole are fascinating, I find myself disagreeing and agreeing with him every other line. would love to have kicked it with him. am planning to just keep re-reading the book until forever

I have just finished Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five", which I enjoyed. I intend to try Grvity's Rainbow again at some point, but while I enjoy reading it, it does take a fair bit of concentration, and I'm not sure I'm always in the mood as I tend to be a bit tired when I read.

reading 'slaughterhouse five' myself atm

Thanks for that Ismael. That's pretty much what I thought was the case with Why England Lose, but I hadn't heard of the Anatomy of England book. Will definitely get it as a present, and probably nab it shortly after to have a read myself - sounds fascinating.

Mason and Dixon is a gas for sure.

Been flicking through Villages of Britain by Clive Aslet, which I've got my mum for Christmas. Well-formed vignettes and exemplars, good, serendipitous cross referencing and nicely produced. Nice browsing book.

Picked up Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky in a bookshop the other day. Would make a nice (expensive-ish) present but I'm not sure for whom, so I didn't pick it up. Definitely worth a look tho.

Finished "Moon Tiger". On the whole the best novel I read in 2010 (so far at least!). Some minor gripes: Lively is an erudite woman with a large vocabulary and she sometimes seems unnecessarily keen to let you know it; and there's a tendency to glam things up a bit, characters all tending to be beautiful, intellectual, creative, sexy overachievers - suggesting among other things that Lively has spent her life on a more meritocratic planet than the rest of us. But Claudia is a terrific character; technically difficult switches of point of view and chronology as well as sophisticated ideas about time and memory are handled beautifully; and emotionally the book is pitch perfect, very moving without ever becoming the slightest bit mawkish.

I wonder what the rest of her adult fiction is like. Poking around I get the impression this may be her magnum opus and the rest of her stuff might not be of similar quality. I'd love to think that isn't true.

The Absolute at Large sounds great, James. Thanks.

Dos Passos was an epic fail. More because it was a tough week for me. Think I'm going to read Pinocchio instead. Then get on to some Boccaccio for xmas.

The verzh of the Decameron that I own is pretty flat and dull, have never known whether that's cos it's a boringly generic translation or if it's Boccaccio's fault.

Is it Guido Waldman on Oxford Classics? Probably the translation; Boccaccio is a lot of fun.

Signed a ILL loan for the MA Screech translation of Rabelais. The woman in the library gave a 'here he is again' look when I insisted that she not bother with any other as I have read him in the other Penguin translation (which read parts of and though it awful)

did urquhart do rabelais? i want to read that one

j, what did you think of duffy's departures from, er, biographical fact, in the world as i found it?

Great opening sentences in literary biography:

Samuel Ferguson is cited as one of the earliest writers to introduce the word "boomerang" into English.

-- Samuel Ferguson: The Literary Achievement, by Peter Denman

Indeed.

Read in the past month:
Death on the Installment Plan (Céline)
Love in the Time of Cholera (Garcia Márquez)

Reading now:
Howards End (Forster)

Death on the Installment Plan is great!

Finishing off Njal's Saga and the bloodbath is kinda dizzying and (perhaps unintentionally) funny.

re: Céline — It was, but it's a brutal read. It seemed like the bleakness would never stop, and the ending is bittersweet (especially if you've read Journey to the End of the Night, which I assume is also semi-biographical and takes place after Death)

R K Narayan's autobiography, 'My Days', which is very funny and sweet, though with odd Conan Doyle-style spiritualist bits

Reading now:
Howards End (Forster)

Some of the best dialogue ever written. Plus, I adore Margaret.

'to each his own' - leonardo sciascia

nominally a detective story about a professor whose curiosity leads him down some unexpected paths while trying to solve the mystery of who killed a pair of local men while they were out hunting, one of whom was apparently in the wrong place at the wrong time. the style is rather detached and very matter-of-fact in the way it tells its tale of a community of people who are content to watch and gossip as the corrupt, evil mafia class does what it has to in order to be assured of its own security and happiness, and not to step in the way as innocents are caught up in its trap. the end of the second-to-last chapter is viciously direct. i do NOT recommend reading the introduction to this before reading the story itself, fwiw. it's good but not spoiler-free.

ha im reading the nyrb edition of 'that awful mess on the via merulana' atm but my attention keeps wandering

Am now half-way through Voyage Along The Horizon, because I apparently cannot keep away from Javier Marias. Being his second book, published when he was 21, it is considerably different from his work of the past few decades. Intermingling levels of fiction with the ghosts of Conrad and Henry James at his side, though don't quote me on that 'cause I ain't an authority. No Shakespearean-quotes-as-motifs here, at least as far as I can see.

i finished jennifer egan's The Keep and followed it up with her short story collection, Emerald City and am starting Invisible Circus - and i just put Look at Me in my amazon cart. kind of in love with this lady.

stuff from the sf poll thread

just read: Casares - The Invention of Morel

starting: Abbott - Flatland

next: Gibson - Neuromancer

i finished jennifer egan's The Keep and followed it up with her short story collection, Emerald City and am starting Invisible Circus - and i just put Look at Me in my amazon cart. kind of in love with this lady.

― just1n3, Friday, March 4, 2011 11:14 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

just1n3! haven't read Emerald City but i love all the rest of those books. look at me is my favorite, i think, though i just read goon squad and think it might be technically better. you're in for a treat.

and yeah i kind of want jennifer egan to be my friend

she is just so... great. no waffling, no wasted words. some of the stories in emerald city are a little predictable, but generally what i love about her stuff is that you just have no idea wheretf it's all going - the keep was a perfect, shining example of that. i want her to hurry up and write more stuff!

Lermontov - A Hero for our Time

ms Egan continues to sound like a must-read

I don't like Patti Smith, but
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/mar/06/jennifer-egan-once-upon-a-life

just started reading andre gidé's "the immoralist"

just read: Casares - The Invention of Morel
What did you think?

Just finished Christopher Koch, The Year of Living Dangerously -- very good, though uses symbolism of Javanese shadow puppets as stand-in for Indonesian politics a bit too heavily

i got the the invention of morel for xmas but havent got around to it yet

Kafka America interesting coming of age or whatever trip about 16 year old German's adventures in Kafka's idea of the New world. Don't think he'd ever been outside of Europe & his Statue of Liberty wields a sword.

john dos Passos Three Soldiers
First world war novel about army recruits. Not read a great deal of it yet but it seems pretty good. Did want to bring USA back from London but it turned out too bulky.

Ronnie Wood autobio
bit confused at times. He claims to have been asked to join the New yardbirds who went onto be Led zeppelin, didn't take the job cos he didn't like Bonham or something and his place was taken by Jimmy page.
Veracity if this is an e.g? New yardbirds only New Yardbirds because they carried on from Jimmy Page incarnation of the old Yardbirds and he somehow got the name.
Otherwise somewhat interesting. Hadn't realised him & Rod were mates to that extent. Or that the Creation job came in a gap after he'd left the Jeff Beck Group & then he rejoined JBC afterwards.
It's no Keef Life but it'll do for the moment.

The Corner David Simon & Ed Burns
wanted to read this after seeing The Wire through last year. Interesting, shows some of the roots of ideas in that series. Now want to pick up Homicide which was around cheap a while back but now doesn't seem to be.
Do wonder if books like these are around cheap in record shops etc if they do actually wind up getting read by a lot of people. Or if they just get taken home, dipped into if that.

Naomi Klein Shock Doctrine
Interesting, full of material I should already be familiar with I think & subsequently feel ignorant on readuing.

Finished The Hobbit over a couple of days last week. Had had it sitting around the floor since picking it up in a charity shop last spring/early summer. I take it this was consciously less mature than Lord of The rings, since it does come across as more of a book to read to children etc. Could be that the reverse is true, that LOTR was made more mature, since written later?
started reading some Dark Reign comics since they've been on my hardrives for a while. Then read Area 52. Must progress to some Liefeld?

Could be that the reverse is true, that LOTR was made more mature, since written later?

Yes

Must progress to some Liefeld?

You can start here.

Must progress to some Liefeld?

You can start here.

yeah just read that yesterday, not really knowing who he was beforehand.
Guess I've probably read some of his stuff without noticing quite how bad it was. It's nice that he makes all the women into ballerinas innit?
I read the first part of Xenogenesis yesterday too & that is as bad as the cover on the thread indicates. What they've done to Emma Frost is sad, somebody's sex doll now?

I like the report on Ronald Wood's book!

He is definitely big pals with Rodney or Roderick Stewart.

I like the details about his failures of veracity.

Someone once told me that RW was the greatest musician in the history of the Stones.

Recently:

Reality and Dreams - Muriel Spark. Short, slight, idiosyncratic, entertaining.
Nemesis - Philip Roth. Decent, rather untypical. Novella length, broad strokes, plain style, and a bit like a fable or 40s movie - thoroughly decent people broken by awful circumstance.
James Wood - The Broken Estate.
War and Peace (re-read)
Nothing - Henry Green (re-read)
Juggling - Barbara Trapido. A conventional but highy entertaining first half following by a pretentious, mind-bogglingly bad second. I was skim-reading to get it over with long before the end. Very disappointing.
Just started The Hare with Amber Eyes, a Christmas present.

I liked Wood's good-natured bio better than Keef's, which I didn't finish. Still think Keef's the better musician though - Wood probably has more of what a music teacher might consider to be "musical talent", but Keef is the one who's been able to produce a significant body of work, both as composer and guitar stylist.

Alfred - surely everyone adores Margaret. But the treatment of Leonard Bast sours HE for me.

I see what you mean. But I also suspect I'm going to die from an identical accident to Bast's.

Don't spoil it, I'm not finished!

Bolano - Amulet. Love the rough quality of his writing.

Mishima - Forbidden Colours. Real lolz @ this. Like Bolano, any characters are just such blatant tools to tell his own crazeee truth. Love how he's just not interested as long as he's delivering blows.

Michael Wood ... Ron Wood ... James Wood

yes, could've used a little guide to that before i puzzled through those stones bio posts.

Michael Wood: sitar

Ron Wood: guitars

James Wood: drums

Elijah Wood: vocals

Accommodations provided by P.G. Wodehouse.

Howards End was great, definitely my favorite of the Forster I've read (Room with a View, Passage to India)

Now starting: Thomas Mann - Royal Highness

More Alan Furst:

• The Polish Officer finished on Tuesday (tight writing; ambiguous ending and loose ends left hanging throughout, I'm divided as to whether this is frustrating or welcome verisimilitude, tending slightly towards the former; some marvellous set pieces especially the sequences at Calais and Nieuwpoort; but lacking a little the suffocating dread of the first two books); then straight onto

• The World At Night (splendid opening, lovely to read a dinner party done well and without smug).

I'm so with you Ismael. Furst's books are wonderful.

As you walk along the pavement you look down through the railings into an area where steam issues from the ventilators and half-open top-lights of changing-rooms and kitchens; you hear the slam of large institutional cooking trays, the hiss of showers, the inane confidence of radio disc-jockeys. The ground floor has a severe manner, the Portland stone punctuated by green-painted metal-framed windows; but at the centre it gathers to a curvaceous, broken-pedimented doorway surmounted by two finely developed figures – one pensively Negroid, the other inspiredly Caucasian – who hold between them a banner with the device ‘Men Of All Nations’. Before answering this call, step across the street and look up at the floors above. You see more clearly that it is a steel-framed building, tarted up with niches and pilasters like some bald fact inexpertly disguised. At the far corner there is a tremendous heaving of cartouches and volutes crowned by a cupola like that of some immense Midland Bank. Finances and inspiration seem to have been exhausted by this, however, and alongside, above the main cornice of the building, rises a two-storey mansard attic, containing the cheap accommodation the Club provides in the cheapest possible form of building. On the little projecting dormers of the lower attic floor the occupants of the upper put our their bottles of milk to keep cool, or spread swimming things to dry, despite the danger of pigeons.

ps / I'm not usually in favour of more and more ilx threads, but - Spring Reading thread? Maybe I'll start it myself.

That's The Swimming Pool Library, pinefox? Nice quote, I quite fancy reading that now.

It is - ever read it before?

No, I googled a slice of that and it took me to this thesis - it wasn't totally clear which of the works it was from. The Line of Beauty is one of my favourite things ever though, so I fancy taking that on now.

They are quite similar; perhaps quite consciously so.

Like you, I greatly admire TLB. If you like the writing in that book, the writing in SPL should not be much of a let-down. He seems to have become pretty fully-formed as a writer by the time he wrote this - was 34 when it was published - and to have been very consistent as a stylist since.

As for the thesis: goodness me, an entire PhD!

I quite like this from Jarman on p.272:
"I wouldn‘t wish the eighties on anyone, it was the time when all that was rotten bubbled to the surface. If you were not at the receiving end of this mayhem, you could be unaware of it"

I loved Line of Beauty too, but found Swimming Pool a bit of a let-down, mainly because Hollinghurst was obviously so in love with his ultra-perfect gay ideal narrator that it really got on my nerves. The actual writing was lovely, though.

I think almost the reverse - that he's clearly far from perfect, he's appallingly irresponsible. Perhaps Hollinghurst indulges him (well, he narrates it so he indulges himself?), but I think we're meant to be infuriated or shocked by his behaviour. Then there is a kind of interesting ambiguity about how far he manages to learn and change from his experience; sometimes he seems to, but in the end, probably not so much.

But AH did move away from the 1st person and (did I read this?) I think he was trying to get away from the trap it had perhaps set him - that in writing an awful person he still had to do it all through that person.

To put it all another way, I partly agree with you cos the character IS irritating - but surely he's supposed to be.

spent my spring break finishing up collections by Edogawa Rampo, Shirley Jackson, Akutagawa, Tanizaki, and Ramsey Campbell, then starting Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles

To put it all another way, I partly agree with you cos the character IS irritating - but surely he's supposed to be.

Actually, that's probably true. But he was just SO irritating!