Spring will be a little late this year: what are you reading, Spring 2011?

I think it's about time!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZc3Dx-W794

I am rereading The Swimming Pool Library, in splashes.

The World At Night by Alan Furst - see every other post I write on here for my thoughts on this guy (I like him).

I was reading for the spec fic poll, but that went all over the shop: ended up finally reading The Kindness of Women by JG Ballard, really extraordinary - don't think I've read anything quite like it in its manoeuvres between fiction, biography & commentary on author's own fiction. Great ice-cold Ballard passages all over.

Winding the spec fic down now; just enjoying TH White, who's stood better than other things read in childhood (lists of odd words, all I really ask for); but getting back to reading Henry Fielding, via Pamela (came to it via Shamela, realised I'd never read the original), finding it v similar to Clarissa - compelling but annoying, boring but 'interesting', in the 'this paper explores' sense.

Reference books on the side: volumes of the Oxford History of English Literature. Yes, Wilson and Hunter, tell me about interludes, tell me everything about interludes.

Spec Fic Poll - is this another ILB thing?

I see these polls turn up here, then when I post to them, they vanish. Will they ever appear again?

Still reading Middlemarch and Barthes' Preparation of the Novel. I am finding Middlemarch really quite funny, much more wry than I had imagined Eliot. The Barthes book is a major contribution to his oeuvre I think - even though it's essentially his seminar notes. Came across this good piece on it in Frieze today: http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/barthes-after-barthes

I think I need to read the RB myself, in an attempt to get a handle on some kind of theory of detail in the novel (ie objects, places, observations - beyond 'reality effect' which seems only a first stop to me) ... I imagine this comes up?

'Preparation of the Novel' is top on my list to read next! (after I've read 'To Kill a Mockingbird')

Thanks for that link Stevie T, looks like a great read!

Pinefox, the speculative fiction poll is a larger scale write-in thing:
▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪ ILX ALL TIME SPECULATIVE FICTION VOTING THREAD & MARGINALIA ▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■□▪▫■

I just sent in 25 titles!

babyfucker

finished:

terminal world - alastair reynolds (another stellar sci-fi novel from reynolds, steampunk-ish tale set on an unnamed future mars, an ending with multiple threads left hanging, and a rather touching group of interpersonal relationships sans any romance.)
zoo, or letters not about love - viktor shklovsky (an epistolary work stemming from shklovsky's correspondence with elsa triolet, with whom he was in love but it was not reciprocated. his letters are self-mockingly self-aware in their frustrated attempts at reaching her heart and hers are gentle rebuttals mixed in with what must have been dangling hooks of hope for shklovsky which likely made him even more frustrated. very funny, very interesting in a look at russian life in berlin in the early '20s esp in light of what followed over the next two plus decades, and the prefaces to many subsequent editions are moving as he looks back at the past.)
unseen - mari jungstedt (more excellent swedish crime fiction from a TV news reporter-turned-author. the last portion is a little too 'hollywood' in its "woman trapped in a killer's death bunker" climax but it's quite good overall nonetheless. it's another nordic novel of this genre obsessed with the past returning to haunt the present, much in line with 'faceless killers', 'echoes from the dead', and the arnaldur indridason that i've tackled.)

Where are you with the Fursts, omar?

The following evening, after an early swim, I went on east on the Central Line. The City had already evacuated, and though the train was crowded to Liverpool Street there was only a scattering of us left for Bethnal Green, Mile End and beyond. All the other people in my car – Indian women with carrier-bags, some beery labourers, a beautiful black boy in a track-suit – looked tired and habituated. When I got out at Mile End, though, other passengers got on, residents of an unknown area who used the Underground, just as I did, as a local service, commuting and shopping within the suburbs and rarely if ever going to the West End, which I visited daily. I felt more competent for my mobility, but also vaguely abashed as I came out into the unimpressionable streets of this strange neighbourhood.

you're farther along than i am, i'm into the polish officer. i'm trying to read them in some semblance of order. i own half a dozen of his works and plan on buying up the rest, i feel as though these will require a re-read or two.

The SPL, I'm reminded, is very sprawling and unresolved. Characters seem to turn up then not have their stories finished. I wonder if this was Hollinghurst's intent.

I looked out of the window
at the widening suburbs,
the housing estates,
the distant gasometers,
the mysterious empty
tracts of fenced-in
waste land, grass and
gravelly pools
and bursts of
purple foxgloves.

Hannu Rajaniemi: The Quantum Thief -- much-hyped Finnish (in English) author's devut spec fic novel, full of great ideas, fell apart a bit at the ending, though

Andy Warhol: America -- lots of his photos and fair few of his mostly fairly banal, though oddly enjoyable, thoughts. Some great pics, though. Best one, which I can't find online, is of Truman Capote soon after a facelift, with all these stitches and blood on his face, behind his ears, etc.

archy & mehitabel!

Harry Mathews - The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium.

Milan Kundera - The Joke. His first. No exercise in language here unless it offends the censor, that is.

John Bowen, The Centre of the Green - one of those quietly rather good middlebrow 1950s forogtten novels.

Love this bit with an old retired colonel tackling a "very long five-generation family chronicle set in a Yorkshire woollen town".

The Colonel did not intend to be defeated by a work of fiction, and having begun, persevered with it. "Going to take me a long time to get through, though," he said. "All this detail! What imaginations these chaps have, eh?"
"How far have you got?"
"Nineteen hundred and ten."
"Cheer up. You're bound to lose a lot of characters in the war."
"More chaps'll get born though," the Colonel said. "You see if they don't."

That's good indeed!

that reminds me an awful lot of brigadier pudding in 'gravity's rainbow':

It occurred to him to focus his hobby on the European balance of power, because of whose long pathology he had once labored, deeply all hope of waking lost, in the nightmare of Flanders. He started in on a mammoth work entitled Things That Can Happen in european Politics. Begin, of course, with England. "First," he wrote, "Bereshith, as it were: Ramsay MacDonald can die." By the time he went through resulting party alignments and possible permutations of cabinet posts, Ramsay MacDonald had died. "Never make it," he found himself muttering at the beginning of each day's work—"it's changing out from under me. Oh, dodgy—very dodgy."

Haha! OK, I need to finally get round to Gravity's Rainbow

That quote's great, James. I'm trying to get out of a slough of not reading by picking up Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L Sayers. Aside from anything else, it's feels like a really good, gossipy portrait of an advertising agency of the period. Good stuff.

I occasionally wonder at the great predominance of women golden period detective story writers. It would be lazy to say it's a gossipy streak, heaven knows men can be gossipy as any cliched spinster, but there does seem to be an eye for the telling detail. What do I mean, I ask myself? I guess a good detective story (of this period as I say) needs to have a lot of concrete detail in it, where the important mechanisms through which a murder happens (hat pin + false leg + illegitimate son, say) do not appear important - they are undifferentiated from the all the other details.

One of the reasons I think John Dickson Carr (the obvious odd man out) is so good (at his best) is that the concrete detail is used so well to produce an atmosphere of dread, fear, the supernatural, malevolence, so that his best work acquires the force of other genre types, less mechanical-seeming in their conception.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter the debut Dexter novel cos I found it for 50c in a charity shop yesterday.

A choice of various Rock bios. Maybe I want To Take You Higher cos of reading Sly threads recently.

Want to get Under a Hoodoo Moon cos I've meant to read it for about 15 years.

Still Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos, but this is in my shoulder bag so is mainly being read on the bus.

& The Corner by David Simon & Ed Burns. about 1/2 way through but it's my current lav book.

Haha! OK, I need to finally get round to Gravity's Rainbow

You really don't!

Did Britons in the eC20 even say 'dodgy'? Admittedly TP probably wouldn't have got this wrong, as I would never have guessed that Yanks in the late 1960s said it either.

Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang has "dodgy" dating from at least 1867!

Wasn't happy with the character in Tom McCarthy's C who used the word 'forensics' in the early 1900s for similar reasons. Maybe it came to them through the radioactive ether tho.

When you have a crack at an LRB you can make progress. I learned a bit from this:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n04/colin-burrow/sudden-elevations-of-mind

- material probably well-known to ILB FAP types.

Meanwhile, I really need to read this in full
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v02/n03/brigid-brophy/james-joyce-and-the-readers-understanding
while wondering, but not too hard, who was Brigid Brophy?

I just re-read The great Gatsby, and before that I read Gifted by Patrick Evans. Nice read for NZ lit nerds.

forensic
"pertaining to or suitable for courts of law," 1650s, from L. forensis "of a forum, place of assembly," from forum "public place" (see forum). Used in sense of "pertaining to legal trials," as in forensic medicine (1845). Related: Forensical (1580s).

Ulysses, for my dissertation. Eeek!

You're in luck -- Colin MacCabe's work now allows it to be read

Thanks thomp. I had a look on the OED (I think that's the citation you've got there? It was the use of it (iirc) as some sort of CSI thing - oh actually I've it to hand, see what you think:

"Wow, you really are forensic," Serge says, looking at a photograph pasted beside the diagram, confirming the positions, indicated by the latter, in which objects have been found.

xxxp
That was a good article on the lives, but damn, poor Yale. Edition pretty much dismissed in last couple of pars. Bad timing with its release I guess; Lonsdale's masterwork still recent (& Lonsdale now v ill iirc)

& xp,

yes, I think that bothered me. I think it still had its 'to do with courts and trials' meaning, not our transferred fussy-science-detection meaning, which that implies.

Now that Colin MacCabe's work allows Ulysses to be read, you can also get some zany views of it here, in an article that I think quite famous that I've just read for the first time:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v04/n15/william-empson/the-ultimate-novel

No letters after that one, to my surprise, but one thing the LRB archive shows is how very tartly ill-tempered and extensive the correspondence used to be.

Curious in the Johnson review, how he explicates the Lives book but then suddenly dashes the aspirations of that edition in the last 2 paras.

& xp,

yes, I think that bothered me. I think it still had its 'to do with courts and trials' meaning, not our transferred fussy-science-detection meaning, which that implies.

I think current meaning derives through usage in terms of original meaning. The science bit has to do with proof for criminal prosecution etc

Incredibly, Empson's review has a second half - another 9,000 words!
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v04/n16/william-empson/the-ultimate-novel

How the LRB used to do things.

xxp
It does look like he just had some things to say about the Lives, which is fine, since that's what LRB essays are for often enough. I guess he wanted to shove the unpleasant business of knocking the edition into a small space at the end.

& re forensic, yes, that progress is pretty clear.

Just finished The World At Night, which is the best one so far (and also the one where least happens).

But disaster! I ordered the next four last week, none have yet arrived. I may take a dip in The Swimming Pool Library this evening, just to tide me over.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v02/n22/sean-ofaolain/the-mole-on-joyces-breast

The things the LRB used to publish - this is perhaps the oddest I've yet seen.

I am reading There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America. It's a good book to read when I want to fall asleep.

I want to read the new Salinger bio and Open City by Teju Cole, but my library stopped buying books and I am out of the habit of buying them.

Anticipating The Pale King by David Foster Wallace (April 15).

I vaguely remember Brigid Brophy as a writer of short, sexy, creepy novels... this may be incorrect

Read an awful, awful novella by Christopher Fowler called 'Breathe', since I enjoyed a book of his short stories years and years ago. This was shit, though, bad Hollywood B-movie on the page.

Now reading Gay Telese: 'Frank Sinatra has a cold and other essays' -- much more the thing. Even the several boxing essays are fascinating, and I'm without any interest in boxing

the only brophy i've read was some cheap looking late sixties/early seventies critical work on aubrey beardsley (picked it up cause there were a few reproductions of his work in there i wasn't familiar with), but i associate her with virago press for some reason, sure i've seen some her novels around second hand in the telltale green covers.

last read: a not very illuminating aleister crowley biography by frances king (cool pictures, though).

currently reading: evil london by peter aykroyd (and based on this and a collection of his essays/reviews/stories i read years ago, really don't like his writing) as well as whitney chadwick's women, art, and society.

^ackroyd, even.

While Lord Warburton, Goodwood, and Ralph are angels next to Osmond

fwiw I thought Goodwood an unconscionable oaf, and the final scene where his kiss - according to some commentators - sweeps her into a passion she has never before experienced and instinctively runs from, I thought was the last and vilest of his whole string of impositions.

i am reading the ask by sam lipsyte and not really enjoying it. it's not funny for one thing. i'm half way through and it really seems to have been whimsy humour-wise and one thing after another plot-wise.

is that really a criterion for whether or not you like a book, pinefox? i have trouble believing it for some reason. also, do you like the book of job?

I don't know it.

I didn't say I had a rigid, definite criterion. I'm just expressing feelings and possibilities:
"I guess that some people like things that they find horrible (like horror films), but I don't think I do."

On the whole, I would guess: if things in a book are horrible (to me), that will put me off. Then, I might want some other things about the book to be really good, to compensate.

Amis's Money is an example. Horrible in a way, but so much else going on.

London Fields is also an example: horrible, and not good enough in other ways (in fact terrible, as I recall) to compensate.

I certainly wouldn't watch a horror film, so that part of my thought stands.

But other people do like horror films. So, there are many different feelings out there.

i want to say that portrait is not really like a horror film, except maybe it is, a little. i don't like horror films fwiw.

fwiw I thought Goodwood an unconscionable oaf, and the final scene where his kiss - according to some commentators - sweeps her into a passion she has never before experienced and instinctively runs from, I thought was the last and vilest of his whole string of impositions.

And no sense of humor. And clearly almost as bad a would-be husband as Osmond, but not a monster.

pinefox, I don't know what you're saying. About 90% of fictional scenarios are ones with which I have no experience or repel me.

From my particular POV a mystery heere is why, if the loveable main character's fate is so repulsive and horrible, you (eg Alfred) like the book so much

I take it you don't like to admire a masterly novelist developing a scenario until he's found a solution.

I could add that all this is about liking a book, and wanting to read it.

There are other kinds of relation that we can have with a book - reading it cos we have to, reading it or reviewing it for money, reading it and not liking it.

I could have those kinds of relation, with horrible books.

xp Alfred: no experience of and repulsion are, I think, two very different things.

It's true that being distant from a subject could put me off, but it might not.

I think that what I am saying is plain and simple enough. That doesn't mean that I expect other people to feel the way I do. They rarely do.

Goodwood! his name is Goodwood! James is hilarious sometimes. i love that freaking book.

Alfred, I think your 2nd post comes in my 'compensation' category, ie: the book is horrible but has good things too.

I'm not sure what is meant by 'solution', because I'm not certain what the problem is. Of course, that's probably cos I haven't read this particular book.

But why should a novelist exploring a horrible scenario repel you? I'm curious.

Because I find horrible scenarios repulsive?

That seems to explain itself, to me, though maybe it doesn't to others.

But, depending on your limits, this would exclude more than half of printed literature, no?

it's horrible like a tragedy is horrible, pinefox. she marries a monster. she doesn't get hacked into a million pieces and eaten. do you not like king lear?

I don't know enough to say. I haven't read one percent of printed literature.

And of course, I will never, ever get anywhere near reading half of printed literature.

I note once more, for clarity, that I'm not saying one should not read horrible books, etc, for various motives, including knowledge and understanding of literary history.

I am only saying that I am less likely to LIKE such books or cherish them.

There might be other examples that would make me think again. I don't have a definition of what is horrible. I only started on this because of a perception that the story of PL is horrible, and people have tended to agree.

xp I do like King Lear. It seems pretty well written.

Tragedy inspires pity and terror, right?

portrait is well-written, too! it's not king lear, but nothing is

xp: People say that. Is it true? I don't know. A lot of things people say about art might or might not be true.

I don't think that what I like about KL is the pity and terror it creates. It's more the vividness of scenes and lines - the same thing Orwell said was good about it.

I'd say that, if you're keen to explore the concept of good people driven to destruction, or compelled to drive other people to destruction (and real people do this, so we should explore it), then fiction is a better arena to do so than anywhere else.

What about the Premier League?

If I'm reading you correctly, pinefox, it's difficult for you to dissociate an affective response from your aesthetic judgments. You also said in the Jennifer Egan thread that you "often find it quite hard to relate to these very different experiences" such as Egan's depictions of the band and a character's kleptomania. Is it difficult to step outside your prejudices and experiences? As a gay man I have no choice; lots of hetero couplings make no sense to me.

For myself, I'm not sure that I see much difference between 'affective response' and 'aesthetic judgment'. They look suspiciously close, to me.

Others may see them very differently.

I can't separate them, but I can separate my experiences. I don't "relate" to most songs or books.

For myself, I'm not sure that I see much difference between 'affective response' and 'aesthetic judgment'. They look suspiciously close, to me.

Others may see them very differently.

― the pinefox, Wednesday, June 8, 2011 12:40 PM (53 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you sound like henry james!

Rilke - Duino Elegies/Rodin/Letters. Love that essay on Rodin is good! He is a fan throughout but he makes this into an intense study.

Soseki - I am a Cat. Some good stuff, the middle class satire is kinda meh, not that angry or funny - doesn't quite register at the mo.

apropos of nothing, my favourite clive james zinger

"Rilke used to say that no poet would mind going to gaol, since he would at least have time to explore the treasure house of his memory. In many respects Rilke was a prick."

Rilke behaved very badly, but he is worth reading.

James - also good value on Canetti and Sartre, iirc.

agreed. i love that quote though. any excuse to c+p.

it's quite possible to read POAL as the portrait of a masochist - or at least of someone who knowingly invites danger into their life, and who (quite bravely and admirably) faces up to the consequence of that choice.

but i love james partly because (as he admitted) his writing tended toward the bittersweet and melancholic. he is, amongst so many other things, 'the master' of regret, disappointment, wrong paths taken, unhappy fates.

That Rilke line is great!

A fifth of the way through The Mysterious Flame Of Queen Loana by Eco. So far, reasonably enjoyable - too early to say, really.

One more empirical contribution to the discussion of literary appeal: I read this first para of an LRB review late last night

Edward St Aubyn began writing his Patrick Melrose novels in 1988. He finished At Last, the fifth and supposedly final book in the series, late in 2010. St Aubyn is a terrific prose stylist and, end to end, these 800 or so pages, covering more than 40 years, add up to something incontestably grand, the nearest we have today to the great cycles of upper-class English life published in the decades after the war – Dance to the Music of Time or Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour. They combine a distinctive and exotic subject – appalling posh people – with a universal theme: families, and whether people can transcend their origins (answer: no). But where you might expect such a series to be panoramic and full of digressions, the Melrose novels are claustrophobic and obsessively centred on a few deeply felt concerns: cruelty, snobbery, neglect, addiction, inheritance. They feature a large cast of sharply drawn gargoyles but are entirely dominated by three characters: Patrick and his mother and father, Eleanor and David Melrose, two of the great monsters of recent fiction.

- and thought: ... hm - I'm glad I don't have to read these books; who'd want to?

I think I would want to, and might actually make moves to enable me to do so.

I am really struggling to find anything readable at the moment. Pessoa, Emin, some Icelandic crime fiction... None of them carry me along. So I am reading pointless articles in last week's New Statesman instead. At least they are short.

Pre-ordered it, should be a nice surprise next January, unless either myself or the publishing industry has died in the meantime.

Meanwhile, Amazon, prompted by my pre-order, has suggested I "get myself a little something" - http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B002TMAN54/ref=s9_wish_co_ir02?ie=UTF8&coliid=I3E2XZASH249ZH&colid=3ONQY8JWZ0IQR&pf_rd_m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_s=left-2&pf_rd_r=11BWE6ZHFE84KYYKYJC4&pf_rd_t=3201&pf_rd_p=466496393&pf_rd_i=typ01

and thought: ... hm - I'm glad I don't have to read these books; who'd want to?

To be fair, St Aubyn's novels are also very, very funny and beautifully written, even if the behavior of the characters is sometimes utterly evil

It's quite a good way to get a reaction, to make your characters behave in an evil way.

You should try that in your second, or possibly third, novel.

I'm glad I don't have to read these books; who'd want to?

'some hope' is a great title: one i'm surprised no one had got to yet

nevermind

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51tSJMVMbyL._SS500_.jpg

Just started "Under the volcano" by Malcolm Lowry. the description of the alcoholic Fermin family passed out on the dining room floor is hilarious. There is really good writing throughout. I know I´m going to love this.

I've had that near the top of my mental 'must read' list forever - keen to hear more

Been dying to trying to read UtV for years. Maybe this summer is the season.

Hopefully before I have to return library copy of David Markson's book book about it

woof otm on St Aubyn, although I do like the inheritance angle. Good quote at the end of that LRB piece.

Stop it here and go there: Summer is always late! What are you reading 2011?

Think some pedants will stay here for another 12 days, at which point the bonfires will be burning.

Under the Volcano is da bomb.

OK, this thread is really closed now.

spring is a season of the heart, not the calendar-makers