Autumn or Fall - does it matter at all?- what are you reading 2011?

just started Julio Cortazar - 62: a Model Kit

Alberto Moravia - Two Women (good but too long...)

Steinbeck - Sweet Thursday. I've been trying to work up the mojo for Ada but it's not happening yet.

strong, I forgot about Humboldt's Gift, which doesn't get as funny as it should until the last third.

*strongo

Started The Female Man by Joanna Russ - 50 pages on the train last Monday, didn't understand much in terms of overall plot but a couple of good scenes so not much of a problem. Unable to pick up since due to my week. Today I've got this horrible cold.

Two Women was p/good. Didn't think it too long as his novels are written in such a breezy style. Never seen the film.

How is the Cortazar, btw?

alfred, noted. also, ward, noted, from previous thread.

took a break from herzog-mania to plow through all three of william gibson's 90s novels in about a day and a half. first time i've re-read all three since they were new. much slighter than i remembered, at least compared to the '80s trilogy, and you can sorta see the drift on the horizon toward the much smaller stakes of the '00s books. still, his worldbuilding remains astounding in places, and for all they get wrong, technology and history wise, they are more often pretty damn eerie in their prescience.

is there a good list of fiction/non-fiction coming out this fall?

haha not herzog-mania, obviously, but bellow-mania. though i did read herzog's book of his diaries from the making of fitzcarraldo a while back and that was...something.

Humboldt's Gift=Bellow at its best in my (and not only my) opinion.

"Two Women was p/good. Didn't think it too long as his novels are written in such a breezy style. Never seen the film.

How is the Cortazar, btw?"

i don't think the other Moravia books ive been reading were too long, but this one is, despite the breezy,precise style.

about Cortazar - just started, seems very sophisticated (not surprising), will report later..

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

― johnny crunch, Sunday, September 25, 2011 12:26 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

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?

― dow, Sunday, September 25, 2011 4:47 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

Ian Livingstone, CAVERNS OF THE SNOW WITCH

Ha ha, i remember that one. In fact, i remember playing the half-length preview version from Warlock magazine (only 200 sections rather than 400), so that's how old-school I am

Arnold Bennett: The Great Man - fun satire of late-Victorian literary world, about a hugely successful and not very good sentimental novelist

Alexander Baron: The Human kind -- short stories/vignettes based on his WW2 experiences. Very good, but not GREAT like his 'From the City, From the Plough' or 'There's No Home' which were similar in theme but were novels, and so had more depth/expansiveness

that bennett book sounds like something i'd like to read, & i have avoided reading bennett

actually i should probably read bennett so i can explain to people why he is, actually, a lot better than woolf

probably i have avoided reading bennett because he is not actually better than woolf, and it would take a lot of cognitive effort on my part to convince myself otherwise

i am reading love at goon park, a biography of harry harlow and a potted history of 30s-50s psychology as it relates to the notion of affection

i have issues with it

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Harlow/fig14.jpg

Bennett is one of my blind spots. Thanks for the reminder.

Anyone read Monica Ali's In the Kitchen? Typical jittery-followup-to-excellent-breakthrough-novel-blues.

having a really difficult time getting into chang-rae lee's the surrendered, which my daughter picked out for me to read next.

much more gripping, in terms of the author's distinctive voice and maintaining my interest in the early going, are (a) marlon james' the book of night women; (b) isabel allende's island beneath the sea; and (c) malcolm lowry's under the volcano. but, for my daughter, i'm going to keep slogging thru the surrendered (for now).

Anyone read Monica Ali's In the Kitchen? Typical jittery-followup-to-excellent-breakthrough-novel-blues

Her most recent one, about Princess Diana, sounds like an absolute car-crash-of-awfulness novel

I just finished Njal's Saga. I would hazard a guess that the body count in this book exceeds the body count in Terminator II by a few dozen. I am contemplating starting a poll on the best names, as listed in the many geneaologies that accompany the introduction of each new character.

Re the Arnold Bennett, it has one of the most vivid descriptions of vomiting I've read in Edwardian fiction:

It proved to be the worst dyspeptic visitation that Henry had ever had. It was not a mere 'attack'—it was a revolution, beginning with slight insurrections, but culminating in universal upheaval, the overthrowing of dynasties, the establishment of committees of public safety, and a reign of terror. As a series of phenomena it was immense, variegated, and splendid, and was remembered for months afterwards.

That's marvellous. There were a few Arnold Bennetts lying around my parent's bookshelves when I was growing up, but I'd casually dismissed him. Edwardian literature seemed so easily dismissable at that age - a position I've almost entirely reversed into it being one of the great underinvestigated periods of recent Eng Lit. Well by me only maybe, still I sense a comparatively slender critical corpus.

Fizzles, you might like to read David Trotter, a critic.

James M, I have the Warlock version too - or I did, I think, and can hardly imagine having thrown it away. Research online last night told me it has only 190 entries.

To be honest every time I have played SNOW WITCH since 2000 I have slightly hankered for more atmosphere - I can't quite work out why the wonderful snow and ice world doesn't come across more strongly, as say the Shamutanti Hills do But this must be unfair - IL does festoon the book with features specific to that world. This is something I like about gamebooks, the choice of features and characters - here a Mammoth, a Yeti, a Mountain Elf, an avalanche ...

I'm reading "Pride and Prejudice". It is the first Jane Austen book I've read and I'm not feeling it tbh.

if you don't like pride and prejudice austen is probably not for you

yeah. i liked the movie of 'sense and sensibility' though

At least, Austen is not for you at the moment. Could change in the future.

which movie version of sense and sensibility? if it was the ang lee one, though i enjoy that movie, it is very different in spirit + tone than the original imo.

yeah the ang lee one. i guess my problem with austen is she concerns herself with things i find awful; gossip, the marriage market and so on. its critical of it i know but also revels in it too. im sure there's subtleties im missing out on though. anyone ever read george moore's "a drama in muslin"? a great book, kinda reminds me of a more caustic and political austen (set among the irish gentry at the turn of the century)

I'm intrigued by 'A Drama in Muslin'--will have to check it out.

Reading Jean Rolin's 'The Explosion of the Radiator Hose', one of those excellent and not easily quantifiable Dalkey Archive books--pseudo?-autobiographical story of Rolin and an ex-Congolese soldier trying to transport an Audi from Paris to Kinshasa to give to the soldier's family to use as a money-earning taxi

if you don't want to read about the marriage market you should avoid Austen. it's not so much that she's critical of it or revels in it as that she's writing about the lives of women like her.

^^^restraint

Here's my confession: I've read every major Austen EXCEPT P&P.

so don't feel bad, Michael.

I learned to love Austen with Persuasion and Emma.

yeah the ang lee one. i guess my problem with austen is she concerns herself with things i find awful; gossip, the marriage market and so on. its critical of it i know but also revels in it too.

No snark intended: doesn't this approach define irony?

i'm not saying you have to have read p&p to like austen, but if you're not sure she's your kind of thing and you don't like p&p, i think it's a fair bet you won't like the others. p&p is the one that's most pleasant.

i mean, emma and persuasion are both better books.

also even if you haven't read p&p you kind of have if you've ever seen a romantic comedy.

i didn't mean "you should avoid Austen" as a criticism, btw; i get what you're saying Michael B. i don't seek out, like, books about a man and his boat or whatever.

reading:

things for skool;

and a bit of the new facsimile of WCW's 'spring and all' (which feels really good and fresh! i like it when books get reformatted and become better to read in the process), and a bit of melissa kwasny, 'reading novalis in montana'.

what is it you're doing skoolwise now, j. ?

slingin knowledge to eager young mindz for generously low pay, no security, etc.

/:

just finished (for a class): Jennifer Egan - Look at Me
right now: Klaus Eidam - True Life of J.S. Bach
afterwards: Robert Musil - The Confusions of Young Törless

it ain't no thang.

Finished The Female Man yesterday and today and I...need to read it again. Suggested it needed a ILX Book Group - SF edn. special arrangement.

http://www.boingboing.net/filesroot/how-to-open-a-new-book.jpg

I just started The Uses of Enchantment and it's super-fascinating although a little bit big on Freud imo and also so far has COMPLETELY by-passed the obvious symbolism of pre-pubescent girls being tormented by evils of the world in every single fairy tale ever, like he can go for 2 single-spaced pages about the wolf in The Three Little Pigs as a symbol of how destructive a child's anger feels but no, female sexuality will not be covered here.

Still, it's fascinating and plus is setting off light bulbs w/r/t to the bible as fairy tale all over my brain.

Dwight Macdonald's Against the American Grain. Man, is he pissy.

started cannery row for bookclub (discussed in the summer thread). i didn't realise steinbeck was funny!

SHGD quotes what I think is an outstandingly good comic line

indeed I was thinking earlier that Money might be one case where you can say 'good sentence', specifically re the comic sentences (though some of those might need a whole para or longer too, to build up and work)

it's nice to add something to Laurel's list though I'm not sure she would actually approve of the book. Laurel, if you ever do read it, your primary reaction may be to its picture of NYC (1981) which I find vivid and in some ways quite true to aspects of NYC still there later, but a resident might not.

I read Money last summer specifically because strongo and other ILXers recommended it.

I have the new Hollinghurst but I haven't started it.

Just finished 'The Rules of Civility' by Amor Towles, which was the first time in I can't remember how long that I've read a guy writing a believable and sympathetic female protagonist.

You can talk shit all day about Proust and I don't care but man is his French lovely to read.

I read the Susan Cooper books voraciously in Junior High and then didn't remember them for ages and somehow wondered if I'd imagined them. The first I heard about them again was here, actually.

I was reminded of Money recently while reading "Lucking Out" James Wolcott's 1970s memoir, specifically during the chapter on porno/times square. Amis rendered the handjob sub-economy more vividly & accurately IMO. take it w/salt cause I am a diehard Martin Amis stan.

Wolcott's book was true to life from what I can tell having moved to NYC about nine years after him. His reminiscences of CBGB and the Village Voice in the 70s were entertaining, evocative. in fact my experiences with a certain editor at the voice were so exactly parallel to his that I imagine the rest of it was spot-on. too much Pauline Kael worship, perhaps, but it all goes down easy.

i'm not sure precisely if "money" is a *great* novel, in the formal unities sense, butbits a pretty bravura performance, first-person narration wise. there's not a single lapse, that i can remember, out of that voice. and pinefox is right that every page there's one or more sentences that just kinda make you catch your breath with their audacity.

Campo Santo - Sebald. great, though not as good as his novels.
Margaret Atwood - Cat's Eye - so good.

Money, The Information and Experience are peak Amis, and really good. Night Train was the beginning of him losing it, and it's been rapidly downhill from there, with some qualified praise for House of Meetings. Yellow Dog was one of the worst books I've read.

Martin Amis, Will Self and Hanif Kureishi are the three writers of whom I've most dramatically gone from I MUST READ EVERYTHING THIS GUY WRITES to THIS IS A REAL TRUDGE WHY AM I DOING THIS

apart from the fact that I don't happen to agree with it, that doesn't make sense

Money 1984
Information 1995
Night Train 1997
Experience 2000

my own view is that all the long novels after Money are dire, except The Pregnant Widow which I haven't read (but those who have think it's dire)

he has always been good at non-fiction: virtually all the essays in Moronic Inferno and W vs Cliché are good, though the essay on Joyce is bad

I think Experience may have become overrated - by me and many others - as a counterweight to the poverty of the later fiction

never really made up my mind about Koba the Dread

ps I think Night Train is one of his best novels, probably his last good one, though sadly that isn't saying much.

If rabbit is a bit too much in any number of ways, folks might want to take a run at the collected Bech stories, which I find really fun.

i think london fields is still peak amis, but i've always supposed there's a divergence between americans and englanders on amis's worth.

man night train was awful

rabbit run is a very accomplished book but it is also nauseating to read a lot of the time.

yeah, i can't think of any other novel i reacted to quite so strongly -- i HATED rabbit's guts through the whole damn thing, and found his sexism (updike's, i think, not just rabbit's) repulsive in a visceral way, but the writing is so terrific that i managed to get through it. you can tell updike studied joyce and nabokov, but he did something really interesting and original with the internal monologue; that long opening scene in the car is incredibly vivid. i can't bring myself to try another updike, though.

yeah i think it's updike's sexism, too, at least in part. it's part of what i find fascinating about his work though; he's good at anatomizing it. i'm not really sure how to feel about that.

this thread has made me pick up my copy of white noise, which so far i'm enjoying. i think that i've always been put off delillo before by that sense of portentiousness that pinefox alludes to upthread - and yes, here there is already some of that, particularly in the way that characters converse in profoundities, in dialogue that is very much not 'realistic'. but the humour surprised me, he seems very brilliant at settings and scene-making, and the anger lurking beneath, and the weary engagement w/ 'modern life', reminded me a little of william gaddis, esp. carpenter's gothic, which is v high praise afaic.

updike, tho, ugh. always seems like such a windy, self-regarding bore, a strainer-after poetic effect, the master of unconvincing metaphor. give me hubert selby any day.

Just taking a break from work by popping into the British Museum and having a root around. Just looking at a folio of The Antiquities of Athens published by The Society of Dilettanti, "a dining club for gentlemen who had travelled to Italy".

You know the Dilettanti are still around?

I didn't! But they look like a bunch of fuckers - I was co-opting this into my Stevensonian fantasies of earnest young men in shabby surtouts hiring private rooms at Inns, dining on roasted fowl and hot wine.

Admittedly any society that could afford taste-making folio architectural surveys of Classical antiquities are unlikely to be cut from that cloth, but I would suggest some sort of ILB FAP guerilla gig at their next meeting, demand the name as our own and read out an enlightened manifesto dedicated sexual inclusivity, liberal discourse on all matters literary and DOWN WITH THE YOKING OF CAPITAL WEALTH TO ARBITRATION OF ARTISTIC TASTE. All to the banging of a big bass drum.

Started on Albertine by Jacqueline Rose. Her article on Rosa Luxembourg was perhaps the best thing I've read on the LRB all year - this is meant to give a voice to the poor girl - see how I get on..

Fizzles, I'm with you! Although, being as how in Australia, not in any actul physical, helpful way...

<3 the susan cooper talk upthread. as a kid i had a fetishistic love for those emblems will stanton finds in the dark is rising -- the circle quartered by a cross, made of wood or stone or bronze. great evocative detail throughout. the mundane stuff was usually just as interesting as the fantastical stuff.

getting the first of these from the library today...

Finished Point Omega. I liked it well enough, slightly to my surprise because I'd been expecting a burrowing too deep into DeLillo-theory, though I tend to think it's not a great sign when you immediately have to read a clutch of reviews afterwards so's you get it. The bookend gallery passages are pretty excellent, the bit in the middle fine. Not a great deal happens though - the wonder isn't that it's only 114 pages long, it's that he managed to pad it out to so many.

Now: the joys of picking a new book from an untapped library.

I finished Galbraith's American Capitalism. Not quite as readable as The Great Crash (it lacks that book's juicy narrative arc) but the central thesis, that the US brand of capitalism functions mainly as an oligopoly offset by interest-group politics, rather than as the unfettered competition of the classical model - is useful, I think.

James Franco's Palo Alto. Two stories in and I like it, it's got immediacy but he hasn't got the voice quite right, sometimes the kids describe things in the wrong way, like focusing on the patterns in which a mentor is going bald rather than the fact of baldness. Kids don't do that, I don't think.

I gather this dude is a mildly famous actor or somesuch. The mere fact of the book is quite impressive I think, that it seems promising even more so.

I feel like I have never not been reading Middlemarch, nor will I ever not be reading it. This is not necessarily a bad feeling.

One can never get enough of Mr. Brooke.

my colleagues are voting for the next book in our book club, and it's a tie with Eugenides's the marriage plot or after dark by Murakami. Which one is better? I know nothing about either book, although I'm familiar w/Muarkami's other work, and I can't imagine that discussing Murakami with my coworkers will be any fun at all.

Neither appeals to me but it sounds like you can be 'done' w/Murakami quicker, and then you can try to get 'em to read Mishima -- just be prepared to be called a 'weirdo' :-)

Finishing Albertine. I think its good, but then I now want to read The Prisoner just to figure what the point of the whole exercise is. So Marcel is pathetic and knew all her lies, and yes its her 'voice' - she comes across as intelligent and all the rest of it. Not sure whether we are meant to be shocked by this or not.

It is good tho' - Jacqueline Rose seldom does wrong.

i am ~50 pages into catch 22 (also for book club). does it get funnier? the humour seems terribly self-congratulatory and i'm not sure i can get through another 400pp.

I agree and don't think it improves much, but we are in a tiny minority round here iirc.

Radio 3's Night Waves did a special on Catch 22 due to the 50th anniversary of its publication and yes not a single bad word about it. I expected some kind of heated discussion there, at least.

Recent readings...

Amy Stewart: The Last Bookstore in America -- a guy inherits pretty much the last surviving bookshop in an e-reader devastated market, finds it's hugely successful, doesn't realise it's because it's a front for dealing very potent pot -- enjoyable tomfoolery

Quim Monzo: Guadalajara -- surreal short stories, very good, unfortunate first name of author

CS Forester: Payment Deferred - 1926 crime novel, surprisingly Patrick Hamiltonesque (though not as good, but still very enjoyable)

Manuel Muñoz: What You See in the Dark - low-key noiry thing set in Bakersfield during the filming of 'Psycho'

And the 33 1/3 books on 'Dummy' and 'Pink Moon', which were pretty good, though the latter had waaaaay too much about a VW ad featuring Nick Drake singing

Read The Melancholy of Resistance by laszlo krasznahorkai. Enjoyed it hugely. Going to read War and War soon.

Also Peter Hennessy's Secret State, history of end-of-the-world atomic bomb preparations in Cold War Britain. Spur of the moment purchase in Waterstones; got as far as looking at it on Amazon, on my phone, while standing there, then decided no, I'd buy it from them. It felt like making a charitable donation to the idea of the bookshop.

Xenophon's Anabasis. I know they're soldiers n all but the violence is disturbingly understated and ever-present - the carte-blanche they feel they have to forcibly obtain supplies and accommodation from any and all settlements they come across, often burning them down when thwarted. And when they finally reach the relative safety of the Black Sea: "Some of you, no doubt, will be going out to pillage. It will be best, I think, that whoever does so should in each case before starting inform us of his intent, and in what direction he means to go, so that we may know the exact number of those who are out and of those who stop behind."

Good old Xenophon. The one great thing about him is his easy prose style, which has made him beloved of anyone ever trying to learn classical Greek.

so true. Thank you for all those 'they marched x stathmous and y parasangs and came to a prosperous, inhabited city' sentences, Xenophon. They made me feel like I was getting somewhere.

Now I feel lame for just reading it in English. I only wanted to discover the real story behind The Warriors.

Still confused as to why it's not called Katabasis btw.

now i want to learn classical greek

go on

it's fun

Reading Patrick DeWitt's The Sisters Brothers on n/a's recommendation, and it is very funny, like Deadwood as a road + buddy movie.

Just finished Kenji Yoshino's book about Shakespeare and the law -- it was REALLY good. I like the way Yoshino writes -- has an understated element to it that can be very moving -- and he quotes Shakespeare at length, which helped me to remember why I used to love Shakespeare (haven't read since high school).

Dante - The New Life. This is brill, although at first it took me a while to re-tune to the concept of poem --> 'behind the scenes' crit on its construction (and I guess er, deconstruction of the meaning of love) --> another poem, etc. I think the mechanical bits ('its a poem composed of three parts...the third is subdivided into two sections') helped.

I like his theory that writing in the vernacular really took off when the women who was being written poems to by some random medieval lothario couldn't understand latin.

Dwight Macdonald - Masscult and Midcult. It's fun to see someone take the high/low distinction in art seriously and try to run with it. I guess it's a bit dated as an approach, but it's kind of refreshing to see someone reify aesthetic values instead of taking the de rigeur, mushy ultra-relativist approach of today.

It seems like Macdonald borrows a lot from Adorno's theory of pop music, but he writes like a curmudgeonly, wise-cracking uncle rather than a Frankfurt school philosopher.

read the latest benjamin black/banville thing this week. don't know why i keep picking them up -- he's good at mood/atmosphere, but he is really not a good mystery writer.