Summer is always late! What are you reading 2011?

Sunshine and showers!

The Song of the Earth - Jonathan Bate!

Find myself taking agin every other word atm.

James M. Cain - Mildred Pierce. Man, this was much better than expected!

'Our instinct about Hardy is this: he values a world - for him vanishing, for us long vanished - in which people live in rhythm with nature.'

His goddam itallics. Here's some nature to live in rhythm with: horseshit. Or at least, he may well have valued it, in fact I'm sure he did, but that's not the predominant tone of his books/poems, surely? The rural world, and the supernatural world perhaps beyond that, in which humans live
and which they have partly created is surely his obsession, but Bate's expression? Just, no.

Or at least all of ILB is going to come and tell me otherwise now, but what do I care, zummer ys ycumen yn!

What was good about MP, Soto?

I read a Hardy novel once, Jude the Obscure. I don't remember anyone in it being in rhythm with nature. But maybe Bate would say that was their problem.

I suppose that there are ways that one can live in a rhythm with nature. For instance, if one grows crops then one might be more keenly aware of the cycles of their growth.

But it could also possibly be protested that people are part of nature too, so never really out of its rhythm. I am not sure.

It's more accurate to say that in Hardy's novels the people can't forget nature if they tried.

I haven't read much Bat, & haven't been wild on what I read. Knows stuff, but ahem not deft with ideas ahem. I've got his Clare biog knocking about the house somewhere, should read that one of these days.

Soto otm - sounds like a weird misreading of Hardy - like he does have an interest in the folk year, fairs, rituals, the craft of farming, but v few English writers have as keen a sense of nature as abomination (plants strangling each other, blasted heaths, life against life in blind universe) and sense of human rustic activity as being this sad struggle with the next fucked-up surprise from dame kind (the sheep are exploding, there's garlic in the milk etc etc).

Bate for bat there, tho' I think I'd like him more if he were Jonathan Bat.

yep that's my feeling about Hardy as well. There's a large supernal storehouse there as well - but it's not 'Huans living in rhythm with nature'. Beginning of Far From The Madding Crowd ffs!

meant to say supernal/folkloric. but yeah - some rhythm! some nature!

or the impressive, boring first chapter of The Return of the Native that dwells endlessly on the majesty of Egdon Heath.

Like the Monty Python version of that better than the original.

Al Silverman: The Time of their Lives -- big oral history of the 'golden age' of modern US publishing (1946-1980ish); interesting, but not wonderfully written. Like a series of congenial middlebrow magazine articles more than a proper book

The kicking Bate is getting is a bit unfair. The italicisation of "live in rhythm with nature" is crass, but Hardy very explicitly thought that a rural way of life that kept people close to the rhythm of nature was passing and that was much to be regretted. Perhaps inconsistently, he was also a gloomy Schopenhauerian determinist who knew nature could be cruel and scratching a living from the land hard and precarious. But I'd have said Bate's only crime is stating the baldly obvious in the tone of someone offering some sort of revelation.

actually it's doubly unfair in that it's more or less an aside. that said, the way it was couched immediately got my back up - it struck me as a summation that no one with a feel for Hardy would make.

He knows what he's talking about, but I do find myself regularly pulled up by evaluations that feel half-baked or right in a vague way but not useful - like the Hardy bit. He is good tho in terms of his own subject matter and it's a novel and interesting approach.

Can't believe PF has only read one Tommy Hardy.

When you live in the country, you live in rhythm with nature, mainly because there is fuck all else going on, so you tend to notice complete shite like tres' leaves sprouting or whatever at different times. Things like trees' leaves sprouting at diiferent times, seemingly following some kind of divine plan about farms, become really fucking annoying.

I have nearly finished my first Scandi-crime novel, Hypothermia by Arnaldur Indrithason. I think it is pish.

Things like trees' leaves sprouting at diiferent times, seemingly following some kind of divine plan about farms, become really fucking annoying.

Well yes exactly. hedgehogs skiers round your toes. The whole rhythm wit nature thing feels a bit silly on examination. But I wd stress, I just plucked a throwaway comment from Bate. It'd be grotesquely unfair to judge him on it.

I think it is pish.

Birdseye potato roffles.

What's the best Hardy? Or the best starting point? I was thinking of starting Tess D'Ubervilles at some point.

The Mayor of Castorbridge is his tightest novel; very few wasted scenes. The first chapter, in which Henchard sells his wife and daughter at a country fair, is one of the quietly horrifying you'll ever read. One of the few genuine tragedies in English lit.

*Casterbridge of course

The rest:

Far From the Madding Crowd - The only one of the majors I haven't finished.

The Return of the Native - I don't find Eustacia Vye as marvelous and sultry as Holden Caulfield and lots of critics. Famous, endless opening chapter describing the majesty of Egdon Heath sets the pace for a rather tentative first third.

Jude the Obscure - Bleak, bleak, bleak. First-rate on observing how a young man of above average intelligence and shitty background is destroyed.

Tess - As weird as Wuthering Heights. He pulls off a difficult trick: he's in and out of Tess' desires and fantasies; he's sympathetic without condescension. Section in which Tess works on dairy farm is one of the few sustained lyrical moments in the English novel. You'll find others in...

The Woodlanders - This reads like a verse play. Love triangle deep in the Wessex countryside.

As for the 'minor' stuff: I need to read Under the Greenwood Tree. Reprints of forgotten things like A Laodicean and Two in the Tower still haven't led to significant critical rediscovery. With Hardy, when's he's bad he's not enough of a craftsman to compel you to finish a novel.

I'm very, very fond of Hardy. I understand why modernists like Lawrence and Pound and heirs (Larkin, Amis, Auden) adored him. Like Hopkins, he straddles two centuries as uneasily as his talent; he always had to work a little harder than naturals like James.

I haven't even mentioned his poetry.

Life and Fate, about 700 pages through.

finished:
Christie - The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Carr - The Plague Court Murders

2 short mysteries for summer. not the best works of either author/detective but entertaining enough.

now reading:
Asimov - The Gods Themselves

it was doing well but now he went to the moon and he's describing everything he knows about low gravity. hopefully the plot will resume soon.

the first chapter of 'return of the native' is only four pages long!

i was a little let down that it broke so quickly from that into people conversating.

I'm impressed by Alfred's words on and knowledge of Hardy, but would also say

>>> one of the few sustained lyrical moments in the English novel.

... hm - aren't there really rather a lot of such moments, esp in the modern novel? Hollinghurst would be an example. Well, depends how you define it. Maybe 'sustained' is key

Pound adored Hardy? really? I would have thought his attitude, whatever it was, would be pretty different from that of Larkin - who detested Pound

'naturals like James' -- kind of get this in contrast to TH, but then not sure what HJ was a natural *at*. Probably not at breezily accessible storytelling.

Sciascia - The Moro Affair. This unsurprisingly ties all his fiction together.

Life and Fate, about 700 pages through.

You can't leave it like this you know ;-) I am planning to read this...sometime

then not sure what HJ was a natural *at*. Probably not at breezily accessible storytelling.

He sure was -- his early novels are marvels of pacing and ingenuity. Try Washington Square. And even the sand dunes of the late novels depend on confident narrative pivots.

I've read WS

I like it OK, or think I like it, or like to think I like it.

To be honest one reason I do that is, I like the title.

I still wouldn't be sure about agreeing with the statement 'HJ was a natural at breezily accessible storytelling'.

then again, perhaps in defence of HJ, who IS?

lots of good novelists - David Mitchell, George Eliot, Lethem - don't necessarily strike me as breezily accessible storytellers.

I suppose Lorrie Moore is or has been.

Mitchell and Lethem ARE breezy but I feel that they deliberately try to make themselves less accessible than they might naturally be.

LM is one writer with whom I never have any problems in this way.

Maybe Dickens was accessible etc, I don't know.

"breezily" is your adverb, by the way.

The obvious barrier to enjoying Hardy is style. When not inspired he's often crabbed and cumbersome, even in his best work. He has no real interest in elegance or finish. But he knows how to feel, and communicate feeling, and I too am very, very fond of him.

My take on the novels

Jude: very different from the rest of his stuff, anticipates modernism (the character of Old Father Time in particular a departure from the realist tradition). Sue Bridehead seems almost anachronistically modern in both her ambitions and neuroses. Alfred is right that it's very, very bleak. I see why many think it the best or at least most important Hardy but despite containing many fine things it's not one of my own favourites.

Tess/Woodlanders/Return: this is core Hardy for me. His strengths are those of a poet, really - Shakespearean in his structures, heavily symbolic, full of numinous set pieces. The Woodlanders, pastoral and elegiac, is under-rated, but Tess is perhaps the finest.

Casterbridge/Madding: These are closer to typical Victorian novels in their social sweep (although still full of stuff that could only be written by Hardy). Many no doubt think that a positive but I like them less than the more intensely poetic novels. For me Madding Crowd is the weakest of the 6 biggies. It's perhaps his best known novel, probably because of the big budget film with Julie Christie at the height of her celebrity.

Alfred, Under the Greenwood Tree is slight but delightful. A rare (unique?) happy(ish) ending. The Trumpet Major is also good.

The Woodlanders is indeed marvelous and has only gotten the critical attention it deserves in the last twenty years. The scene I always remember is the one in which Winterborne hides in the tree while his beloved calls to him.

Hardy confused realism with bleakness, so that the horrors to which he subjects Jude and Sue look rigged from the start. This tendency also mars a fair chunk of his poetry too.

More likely bleakness was the sort of realism he best understood and had the greatest affinity for. What you have to look at is whether the bleakness seems superficial.

I just finished True Deceiver by Tove Jansson. The Summer Book is checked out. I will take Comedy in a Minor Key to read on the plane.

Peter Shapiro Turn The Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco. Man, is this book fantastic. So much incredible music to get to know. When there's an extended discussion of a single record (pretty often), I'm trying when I can to fire up the track in question and it makes for such a rewarding way to discover new stuff. I sometimes struggle to find an 'in' to genres off my current radar, soul being one of those right now, but doing it this way immediately overcomes any resistance.

Awesome discoveries today:

• The O'Jays: Back Stabbers
• The Undisputed Truth: Smiling Faces Sometimes
• T-Connection: Do What You Wanna Do

I once sent The Summer Book to someone in Sweden.

I suppose that is a bit 'coals to Newcastle'.

Mr Klata, I also don't find it easy to get into other genres, and soul would often be one of those (though in truth I might have thought that soul and disco were two different genres; I daresay they are and your book is about both).

No, I think you're right - I've been working through a series of chapters today showing the evolution of soul music's arrangements, rhythms and lyrical concerns around the early seventies moved together towards a kind of artifice, which is essentially the disco sound. The overall theme seems to be to expose a certain tension in the post-civil rights era upward mobility of the black middle classes, which I couldn't really say is accurate or not, but is certainly fascinating.

iirc, Isaac Hayes was the immediate soul forerunner of disco and Donna Summer was the inflection point from soul into full disco.

Turn The Beat Around is indeed great and so is Tim Lawrence's Love Saves The Day. And Ismael, LSTD is maybe a bit less fun to read (I remember loving Shapiro's voice whereas Lawrence tries to be more objective and scholarly) but LSTD is definitely stronger when it comes to listing actual songs and it has lots of DJ/Club top tens for particular years so you can see the changes from the Francis Grasso sound of the early 70s to Siano, Mancuso, Levan etc. There's supposed to be a second volume of LSTD coming out at some point that covers post-disco 80s 90s stuff.

Thanks for the Hardy reccs! Hopefully I'll get to one this summer (Tess, Jude or Casterbridge).

Now I'm on to The Tenants of Moonbloom by Edward Lewis Wallant.

I read Comedy in a Minor Key last night so I must go to the library tomorrow morning to borrow Art of Recklessness by Dean Young. I've written down the call number in advance to save time.

Comedy in a Minor Key is ace. What did you think of it?

Read Robert Charles Wilson (probably my favourite living SF writer)'s 'The Harvest', and am now on Koestler's 'The Case of the Midwife Toad', which was $2 at a charity book shed

Adorno - Aesthetic Theory

woo!

i'm saving that until i'm 'ready'.

i'm almost done with richards, 'the romantic conception of life', now reading frederick beiser, 'the romantic imperative', and a bit of wallace stevens. and still schopenhauer.

I was reading Critique of Pure Reason but stopped because I felt like I didn't have enough time to devote to it to gain any real value or understanding from it.

last year i started going chronologically through the books of l.m. montogomery ("anne of green gables" etc), but i had to stop about halfway through because i was getting cynical about her recycled plot elements and pet disdains (fat people, Italians, the French, etc). i've started back up again with her "emily" trilogy and it reminded me what i loved about her -- the reverence in which she holds art and the creative spirit, her respect for traditions that are emotionally fulfilling, etc. however she still has a chip on her shoulder about people who don't "know their place" that infects even her best characters, which is disappointing.

next up is "the blue castle," which a lot of people think is her best work. it's hilarious and also the kind of "mousy girl makes good" story that i would devour when i was younger.

I got about five pages into The Windup Girl before giving it up as a bad job. Gah, £7.99!

get thee to a bookswap

the german solution: saving books by keeping them expensive.

ha, eveyone i know here just orders from amazon uk.

I finished Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child yesterday. It was excellent as ever; he creates such dense works, all symbolism and allusion while never letting that interfere with his plots. However, this is only my third favourite of his I think - The Line of Beauty captures a modern time and place in such an exciting way that was never properly managed here in the modern sections, due to the modern bits being a little unattractive and basically inconsequential (literary endeavours rarely make for an engaging fictional world I find). Which is also somewhat the case for The Swimming Pool Library, except the modern bits are better there; more importantly, there the payoff is at the end, while The Stranger's Child effectively has its at the start.

This morning I started on Steinbeck, Cannery Row.

Can't wait to read the Hollinghurst.

do let us know what you think, anyhow. cannery row is a good one to start with i think. what have you read with your group in the past?

― and my soul said you can't go there (schlump), Wednesday, 14 September 2011 12:25 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

last month was my first month.

october: cannery row, november: rabbit run, december: catch 22, jan: despair by nabakov. september was ivy compton burnett.

ah okay. that's a good run over the next while. i'd be well paired with things that i need peer-pressure to persevere with.

yeah i'd always kind of assumed i'd be forced to read "one day" and things like that, but this is a mixed group (american, german, british, etc.) so mostly we just stick to minor classics and there's one or two v well informed readers. rabbit run was my choice. hope they don't hate me for it.

I just finished Cannery Row. I'm not sure what to think. On one hand it's a lot of fun; is a breeze to read; has plenty of joyous, harmless yarns; evokes time & place not exactly perfectly but nicely, and with sympathy and feeling; and made me laugh a few times. On the other hand, Steinbeck's not an abstract thinker or theorist, and he never joined the Communist Party.

the historical / diary bits in swimming pool library are remarkably boring, hard to get through

yo just to pipe in cannery row is fuckin awesome and serious writing, to me, just such a joy to read

I just finished Cannery Row.

Read Sweet Thursday within a few weeks. Those 2 books are the gift I give myself every year during my birthday month, for comfort and hope and the sheer pleasure of reading.

aw that's lovely. i haven't read ST!, b/c i started it, you know, after that two week deadline & was all 'who is doc again?', realising i kinda owed it to myself to at least refamiliarise myself with the characters. one of steinbeck's texts on marine biology is still part of the canon, i once heard, still taught, & doc is based on a real guy whose name i forget - like i can picture the lab from that book & i feel some of that is because of the guy's immersion on it, the same as with roth's jewellery store or whatever. steinbeck 'evoking time and place' is perfect to me - not against any kind of measure of authenticity but just as very vivid places that are super well drawn (he's one of the few guys whose attention to landscape sustains my interest, i can zone out with that kind of thing), the people a big part of that too.

i think i find the vignette structure of cannery row particularly appealing, when i think of it.

yo just to pipe in cannery row is fuckin awesome and serious writing, to me, just such a joy to read

^^^^^^^ yeah for reals; he just writes the concerns and morals and efforts of people so well, which might be a different thing to what particular other authors do to find their zone but which is totally serious writing nonetheless

immersion in it, and, not literally. not submersion.

schlump so otm about steinbeck. fuck the haters, seriously.

so pleased by all the steinbeck love here---thought I might be a lone voice

Reading some of Yeats' poetry -- admitedly I haven't been able to put a lot of effort but its still been liquedifying my brain this week.

Nearing the end of the excellent The Pursuit Of The Milennium" by Norman Cohn. As jolly a history of Middle Ages heresy in Northern Europe as you can imagine.

Prompted by a friend, I think I may make a go at Gene Wolfe's Book Of The New Sun. It'll be my first mounted attack at serial fantasy since I was, I dunno, fifteen.

I read Frank Kermode's PLEASURE & CHANGE - not just Kermode but various 'discussants' responding to him and vice versa: only short, but one of the most waffly books I have ever read. Must give it away.

Osip Mandelstan - Conversations about Dante. Great great piece - goes on a bit lke Proust in trying to push description by using science and those kind of mechanics to delve into what makes Dante tick and also is actually very pub conversational (unlike Marcel).

I really need to read East of Eden. Some (hate to use this word, but no getting around it) haunting images from Kazan's version, which so affected the early adolescent Scorsese--as seen in his amazing documentary (this is the whole thing, but the page also has links to excerpts and synopsis)
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/a-letter-to-elia/watch-the-peabody-award-winning-documentary-film-by-martin-scorsese/1844/ Anyone read Kazan's novels?

won't go on about 'east of eden', but nearly invoked it when talking about consensus steinbeck stuff, because iirc it draws some criticism on a thread on here. is great, is kinda thematically huge in the way the shorter ones aren't. someone i know pretty much reads it round and around, so has a copy to hand that they'll dip in and out of for reference.

Stoner - John Williams. good but somewhat overhyped

nr: 'the art of scandal'

also have john cage's 'silence: lectures and writings' and 'on the camera arts and consecutive matters: the writings of hollis frampton' out from the library

Was feeling stressed, reading Barbara Pym (Civil to Strangers), am now less stressed

finished what is the what. i kept thinking that he'd have to rush things at the end, but it came together nicely. and it got me interested in learning more about sudan.

beginning chang-rae lee's the surrendered.

from the should-have-read-years-ago-for-multiple-reasons-but-never-did file: a buncha saul bellow books.

Just stop after 1965 though.

i am currently at 1959 and will keep this in mind.

I'll retract: he wrote several good stories, like "Something to Remember Me By," one of my favorite novellas. Besides being a great portrait of a particularly noxious post-Marxist art critic, it includes the best depiction of the hell into which airport bars and cuisine can slide.

man 'henderson the rain king' is such an incredible book

Ravelstein was the first Saul Bellow book that I read. It's not as good as the '50s and '60s stuff, but it's not terrible by any means.

I recently finished Keith Gessen's All The Sad Young Literary Men. I enjoyed the parts about under-employed, over-educated guys trying to get laid (most of the book) better than the political interludes about Israel, which seemed to have an eat-your-peas quality.

Now I'm reading Peter Hessler's River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze. Wikipedia says Hessler just won a MacArthur grant - good for him!

Well into Njal's Saga (aka The Saga of Burnt Njal) right now. I am reading the Penguin version, translated by Magnus Magnusson. Much more compelling than King Harald's Saga, which I read in August.

It's a pretty amazing picture of Icelandic society circa 950 to 1000 AD. Any time some NRA gun owner starts to spout about how the Old West in the USA was amazingly civil and peaceful because everyone carried a gun, all one has to do is think of this saga to realize what horseshit that is. Despite everyone's being armed in Old Iceland, blood feuding was rife and murder was utterly commonplace.

The Rum Diary by Hunter Thompson

catching up before the movie?

The Europe vs US firearm death stats argument may not have swayed those NRA guys towards gun control, but I've a feeling Njal's Saga could be just the thing to win them over.

The true-believing NRA types are hopeless, but it is still a good idea to point out how ridiculous their solemnly-avowed beliefs about history and reality are, compared to actual facts and real history.

I'm a hundred pages into Twilight Sleep, one of Edith Wharton's neglected novels from the twenties (I've read the other big ones). It's interesting how she enjoyed a string of best-sellers in the twenties which no one reads anymore.

She might deserve her own thread.

Wuthering Heights in anticipation of the Andrea Arnold movie.

And after that Marlowe's Faustus and The Jew of Malta.

TOTTENHAM HOTSPUR: PLAYER BY PLAYER

I read "Treasure Island". Quality does dip in the second half -- I'd say the chapters on the island that don't follow Jim Hawkins around are when it starts to go wrong. The novel's opening chapters are perfect and I am thinking of copying their structure if I ever write a story.

what they fought for, 1861-65 -- james m. mcpherson (finished the other night)
the rise and fall of the plantation south -- raimondo luraghi
eichmann in jerusalem -- arendt (rereading)
brideshead revisited -- waugh

Despite everyone's being armed in Old Iceland, blood feuding was rife and murder was utterly commonplace.

Yeah--I read Sigrid Undset's 'Kristin Lavransdattir' (set in medieval Norway) and it was quite apparent that the fact everyone went around armed meant that any heated dispute usually ended up with someone getting an axe in their skull

'm a hundred pages into Twilight Sleep, one of Edith Wharton's neglected novels from the twenties (I've read the other big ones). It's interesting how she enjoyed a string of best-sellers in the twenties which no one reads anymore. She might deserve her own thread.

I LOVE Wharton. Twilight Sleep, while not her best, was still lots of fun.

And after that Marlowe's Faustus and The Jew of Malta.

― Davek (davek_00), Thursday, September 22, 2011 2:46 PM (8 hours ago)

hm, i should get around to the jew of malta. i adore dr faustus

Strongo, don't stop w Bellow before you get to Humboldt's Gift, which is terrific (I prefer it to Herzog, personally) - a great and funny novels about writers and the anxiety of influence.
I admire rather than 'like' some of the late, bitter Bellow novels, especially the Dean's December, which is quite a dark, troubling book in many ways. Ravelstein feels like slight return on Humboldt's Gift, where the biographical correspondences are even less disguised.

Henderson the Rain King is a great work of imagination, but seems to stand slightly aside from the rest of Bellow's fiction.

Be advised, yet another What Are You Reading thread has been started for us, wherein we may continue this delightful conversation.

started dana spiotta's eat the document, def am diggin it; of course instantly thought abt ilm w/ the record collecting kid & neighbor & dennis wilson section

Good interview with Spiotta on Fresh Air, still available as podcast (check the music at the end by her stepfather, who inspired the novel)
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/22/139715507/in-arabia-writing-life-as-you-wish-youd-lived-it
Wonder if she knows about Mingering Mike?

can we close this thread? We got the autumn one open. We can transfer the last couple of posts to it.

if you close it, please transfer these thx

ty, dow i will def check that out