beckett's reading list

Mosquitoes by William Faulkner: “with a preface by Queneau that would make an ostrich puke”

LOL

Crooked House by Agatha Christie: "very tired Christie"

trying to imagine which Christie he preferred -- maybe And Then There Were None?

got to vote for Frank Kaffer here even tho The Trial wd be better

Do we know when he was reading these? (... and I don't mean while sitting in the lavvy)

Voted for Frank Zafka too, can't help but think no wonder this guy was glum reading all this stuff.

Between Céline and Kazkfa for me. Haven't read a few of these though.

Kafka or Camus, probably going with Camus. I love what Blanchot I've read but not done the one in question yet, so can't vote for that. Racine and Céline on the 'important writers I haven't read' list. I liked Mirbeau's Torture Garden but didn't think it was amazing, not read the book on the list. Catcher in the Rye is definitely a good book but even when I was a kid I knew if I wanted existentialism I should go to the French instead of the Americans.

not glum, just a realist

many years ago when i worked for the Inland Rev i got a letter from a bloke comparing my work to "The Trials by Frank Kaffer"

"The Temptation to Exist" by Emil Cioran, never read this but, you never know, it might be really funny

Cioran was in my 2nd place rank but i don't think i've read that one tbh

I would've thought Man's Fate was the sort of thing Beckett threw across the room.

wrong Camus as well really, La Chute wd've been harder for me to pass by

He might have! (xp)

can see him reading malraux just to come up with some quality zings

this is looking good:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/5155mok4s9L._SL500_AA300_.jpg

i used to have a lovely copy of A Walk on the Wild Side with that style of cover, think a fair bit of *cough* LI-TER-A-TURE must've got snuck out disguised as bodice rippers in 50s America

I'd like to see them try it with "Malone Dies"

... mind you there is some sex in it

Yeah, considered L'Entranger (xpost), but it's not my favourite. La Chute and, irrelevantly for this, The First Man would be preferences.

Think I'll go for Céline. Frank Kaffer (lol) in all sorts of ways 'better', more profound, ecompasses the dark heart of matters etc, but the sustained energy of Céline's philosophic cynicism is so appealing on a sentence by sentence level. It's curiously enlivening, optimistic even in an admittedly bizarre way. ('With such a view, nothing unpleasant can surprise me, and I am fully forewarned and forearmed against hatred and death, I feel compassion for everyone that has to go through a similar thing, even though humans are disgusting and contemptible' - something like that.)

article shows beckett as frankly dismal blurber - 'it is lively stuff', 'excellent once past the beginning', 'great stuff here and there'.

Voting Celine.

& Gamaliel otm.

Think Picador had a stab at sexing-up Beckett with this cover
http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1293685661l/4770869.jpg

god there was a time when i'd buy more or less anything on Picador lol 80s

Yeah, what was up at Picador, I used to have this:

http://lh3.ggpht.com/_BsePKX0h59Q/S3-60tOp4kI/AAAAAAAAD1s/jPys0rSJKG4/beckett_murphy_thumb%5B2%5D.jpg

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/02/ciu/f0/06/441c36c622a07cd22acbc110.L.jpg

^ I had this

that one i feel is an actual affront to the contents

wow i read this thread and literally thought it was about josh beckett and on i love baseball until i finally clicked the link at the top

Whoah that Murphy cover!

I think that O'Farrell book is just what it looks like - B has a bit of that 'I only read Euripides, Gogol and the latest Dick Francis' thing going on - claimed Java Head by Joseph Hergesheimer was one of the best American novels at one point (I've only glanced at it, but it looked a lot like a straightforward historical saga).

fair enough, sometimes when i've had a few i make the same claim for Valley of the Dolls

Dick Francis (or his wife, allegedly) was just a genuinely not very good writer tho i think

Never read any (can well believe he is not much good), but he always jumps to mind because I saw a run of them on the shelves of distinguished literary academic. Also Amis/Larkin liked him iirc? Would wager that Gamaliel has a stance on Francis.

The Queen Mother's favourite author? Or the Queen or Thatcher, one of those horrors.

yeah i think it was Kingsley who repped for him publically, don't know if Larkin was a horse racing fan.

probably my dad's favourite author, he spent a couple of years getting hold of everything the dude wrote

Just had a look - Larkin has a couple of pieces on Francis in Further Requirements - '20 times more readable than the average Booker winner' etc etc.

I think our household library consisted exclusively of books by Dick Francis, Agatha Christie and Dennis Wheatley when I was growing up. The unacknowledged legislators of 20thC Eng Lit.

ok so i was thinking that at least Beckett wasn't a Francis reader but what do you know topics include 'Francis, Dick -- Criticism and interpretation''

good research there

thank you, i am more of a scholar than a critic imo

I had glandular fever once and read about 15 Dick Francis (I go on these fits sometimes). I find it hard to see any good in him really. I'm he seems extremely competent at compact plotting and the like. I'm not very good at noticing that sort of thing though, and although I like golden age 'tec writing, we live in a post-Chandler world - never mind the plot, show me the cynical gunsel and the filth of the streets.

Thin on atmosphere, women all the same, usually shortish (lol) and blonde, criminal usually easy to spot (in almost an Enid Blyton way), car chases quite effective. Inevitability of template can mean a lack of tension (but then, don't read 15 in a row). I don't know, I just didn't really care about anybody in his novels, which may be because they tend to be filled with people I don't really like in real life.

Someone here likes him though iirc, and may be able to put up a decent defence.

Kingsley Amis was a big fan, although that was well into his literary trolling period so it can be a little difficult to know with how much salt to take that. (I mean, I'm sure he liked him, but asseverations as to his literary excellence can be squinted at a little I think).

I'm he not extremely competent at compact plotting btw.

my dad read one of John Francome's novels once but didn't like him. don't know whether this means he's better or worse than Francis tbh

Didn't know he wrote books but he's got laods of them!

i didn't realise he'd written so many until i googled him

One a year without fail since 1986... none this year yet, 's up Johnny?

He might be having trouble coming up with a title as arresting as the other 25

Looking at Francome's bibliography on Wikipedia, I'm surprised he and Dick Francis didn't clash over two-word horse ref thriller title ideas at some point.

if all those titles use different horse racing metaphors to Dick Francis then i'm impressed

Got to 22 before finally giving up the ghost and allowing Dark Horse.

Sadly no "Sheepskin Noseband"

oh the Francis biblio on wiki is great, it has a column for "Main Character" that i'm about to poll

Francome's new one shd be called "5 Day Ban for Excessive Use of the Whip", cd reach him a whole new audience

feel like Francis running into title trouble somewhere around 10 LB. Penalty

Sugar Lump

Glue Factory

Stable Lad

Got to 22 before finally giving up the ghost and allowing Dark Horse.

Especially odd because cover designer v fond of silhouettes of horses

imagine Francome's glee when he realised he hadn't used that one yet

some of Francis's novels don't revolve around horse racing, hope Francome didn't get airs and branch out like this

Storm Rider (2010)

Bit arty?

meanwhile

Mirbeau’s fictional car trip then takes him to Germany, whose industry, cleanliness, and order stand in contrast to what Mirbeau regarded as the slovenliness and laxity of his own countrymen.

ruh-roh

Jim Morrison influence creeping in. xp

Used the word gunsel up there, and pretty sure I'd only heard it in The Maltese Falcon. Had always assumed it was a synonym for a low-level hoodlum.

Checked it out on the OED. Yiddish: genzel < German: gänslein gosling, little goose.

1. A (naïve) youth; a tramp's young companion, male lover; a homosexual youth. (with the emphasis on passivity I think)

last citation 1946

Subsequently it becomes

2. [as if < gun n.] An informer, a criminal, a gunman.

But the Dashiell Hammett citation is from the first definition:

1929 D. Hammett in Black Mask Nov. 43/1 Keep that gunsel away from me while you're making up your mind.

(Tho without context it seems ambiguous)

So I guess The Maltese Falcon ref is in fact to the first, although I imagine there was some bleed in connotation.

voted for la 628-E8 on principle

peter o'donnell, the creator of modesty blaise, described this nice fan letter from kingsley amis as "the proudest moment of my career":

http://www.modestyblaiseltd.com/proudestmoment.html

the spectrum sf anthologies edited by k. amis and conquest are really gd, and not that 'conservative'. amis was friendly with brian aldiss and jg ballard. he was like anthony burgess, he had WIDE-ranging taste in popular fictions

Absolutely - as his New Maps of Hell shows. Amis also got a letter from Philip K Dick saying The Alteration was the best alternate reality novel he had read. At his best Amis was adventurous both in terms of style and subject matter and an excellent critic, especially when he praised.

But the Dick Francis refs are borderline that period where he said and wrote quite a lot that seemed designed to provoke a reaction in what he perceived as new and faddish critics, his son certainly amongst them, and less in the manner of his inclusive and intelligent literary writing (which he still wrote). I'm not saying that the Dick Francis books don't have merits that he could see where I can't (it's certainly been the case elsewhere), or that he didn't genuinely enjoy them (I think he did), only that I feel warier about Amis's praise than I might elsewhere.

There's an amusing interview with Brian Aldiss, CS Lewis and Amis in one of the Spectrums that's worth a brief read if you see it as well.

Nice and cheerful on those Beckett bokshelves.

Voted Celine, as Journey i a better book than The Castle..., although if Death Sentence was the Blanchot choice (not read Lauteramont and Sade) it would've been tough choice of 'fascinating' brand of fascism for a Friday night.

oh yeah fizzles, i'm with you, dick francis seems like a TERRIBLE writer - perhaps for certain british men of a certain age, francis took the place of edgar wallace novels, bulldog drummond-type stuff, as that kind of brit pulp died out - pure grinding genre mechanics, familiar, hastily written guff. the only popular author i've ever read who is as awful as dick francis is jeffrey archer.

Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane: “I read it for the fourth time the other day with the same old tears in the same old places.”

<3

Tempted to vote for Fontane, actually: did really like Effi Briest

1. A (naïve) youth; a tramp's young companion, male lover; a homosexual youth. (with the emphasis on passivity I think)

Interesting because that was precisely the original meaning of punk. Still in use according to the prison memoir by Randall Dale Adams (1991).

'punk'=prostitute slightly earlier I think fwiw, (from which presumably 'kept homesexual youth') but yes.

I've read most of that Blanchot book; it's okay but seems like a weird choice? I mean they are good essays and come at an important transitional moment in his oeuvre (as well as in, uh, european history), but frankly(lol) it's pretty academic stuff (explicitly responding to, IIRC, Bachelard's book on Lautreamont, and Klossowski's on Sade)

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