"In that progress of life which seems stillness itself,"-- WHAT ARE YOU READING SPRING 2013?

Let's not drop the ball again, gang! I'm p.excited for the next 3 months of reading.

Currently rereading Spring and All (see title) + various early (minor?) Eliot poems. An endlessly fruitful agon, that.

Also steadily plowing thru The Moonstone -- after a great deal (~150 pp) of amusingly Shandyesque dilatory prelude, the inevitable mysterious theft of the titular stone has FINALLY come to pass, along with a barely perceptible increase in the narrator's sense of urgency.

Jeffrey Frank's Ike and Dick, about the fraught relationship between Eisenhower and his vice president.

Isherwood's sixties journals.

George Saunders' latest collection.

reading saul bellow's herzog

gonna start the new sam lipsyte short stories also

xp have you read A Single Man? I heard about it a few months ago & was almost tempted to pick it up in a bookstore recently, mostly for reasons of 'historical significance' or w/e, but changed my mind at the last second & bought some poems instead

I've begun reading Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. A third through the first book, will probably take a break before I begin book two. Also, I'm reading Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway, on using quantum physics to rethink... a lot, I suppose, I've only read the introduction.

A Single Man is a marvel. The movie offended me.

THE WORLD IS NEW

I'm kinda between books atm. Last night i was just trolling around in my guidebooks, thinking bout camping and hiking destinations for the upcoming summer season. I've got The Recognitions by Wm Gaddis as the probable 'next book up', but I may take a brief detour or two or three before I get cracking on it.

almost finished with jane bowles' collected writings and i like her so much i may never read anything her husband wrote

Commuting book, more World War II: The End by Ian Kershaw. A bunch of egomaniacs pursuing insane, grandiose schemes in an atmosphere of increasing decadence; while outside a miserable, cowed population faces the death rattle of a once-great city.

Bedtime book: Love Goes to Buildings on Fire by Will Hermes. A study of New York's early seventies music scene.

Broken April - Ismail Kadere

65 years of washington - juan jose saer

lmost finished with jane bowles' collected writings and i like her so much i may never read anything her husband wrote

a portable Jane Bowles was reissued in the nineties; need to give it a go.

Her husband is marvelous, particularly teh short fiction.

Sorry Alfred meant to come back to you on House of Mirth but got wrapped up in other things. Probably just as well I could feel hobby-horse verbosity coming on.

I'd love to read it!

Also steadily plowing thru The Moonstone -- after a great deal (~150 pp) of amusingly Shandyesque dilatory prelude, the inevitable mysterious theft of the titular stone has FINALLY come to pass, along with a barely perceptible increase in the narrator's sense of urgency.

i was amazed at how good the moonstone is once it gets going.

i'm reading a sport and a pastime for two more nights, don't know after that.

Alfred, what was offensive in the screen version of A Single Man?

It sentimentalized the novel, especially in one unforgivable change.

What was the change? I saw the movie, haven't yet read the book.

Remember a phone conversation with his dead lover's parents? In the book he IS invited to the funeral.

Hard to imagine, the way the movie presents things. I'll have to read it. Thought the movie was substantial enough, though something of a soap opera too.

Julianne Moore was unwatchable.

read a little dos passos last night - got to feeling like i should commit to 'u.s.a.' just to stick it to the haters ('dos passos is not all that')

Reading mostly drama academic type books - The Moving Body by Le Coq, Michael Chekov's To The Actor and just finished Declan Donnelan's The Actor And The Target.

I just ordered Independent People to carry around for when I need a break.

I'm surprised by the extent to which the acting stuff is of philosophical value. I mean, I guess you'd imagine it would be, but it really is the study of life itself.

It's not how I'd imagined it, but I can sort of see what you might mean. Have you got a choice quote or example?

The Engineer of Human Souls - Josef Škvorecký. ironic, enoyable, sort of a Kundera style novel.

I started on The Recognitions. I see at once that this is a novel where people do not speak much. Dialogue is extremely sparse and what there is is constantly interrupted by the narrator and surrounded with decorative cushions embroidered with authoritative additional observations. As a rule the narrator mediates every act, thought and tiny detail through the filter of a very ornate and involved prose style.

Weirdly, his next book, JR, consists of almost nothing but scraps of dialogue stitched together with almost no narrator evident.

After nearly 3 months I have finished Williams' IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN.

Really wanna read the recognitions & the man without qualities but in both cases the copy I have is simply TOO BIG to carry around. I think I'd have to quit my job before getting round to them.

Started de Beauvoir's The Mandarins, a deferred pleasure.

Really wanna read the recognitions & the man without qualities but in both cases the copy I have is simply TOO BIG to carry around. I think I'd have to quit my job before getting round to them.

― beau 'daedaly (wins)

Have library copy of Joyce Carol Oates's Blonde that will go back basically unread for the same reason.

In Denmark The Man Without Qualities is four books. Which really helps a lot. The first book is 330 pages, I can read that in the month I can have it from the library. Then I can read something else and return to Musil book 2 after I've forgotten what it was all about. Perfect.

The Recognitions is quite good. Perhaps it didn't need to be 900 pages, and it's not as dazzling as a lot of what it inspired, but it was good. I really want to read JR as well, but I've got a lot of those postmodern mammoths, and I've only finished a few...

My dalkey archive copy of The Recognitions weighs 2.5 lbs. I must be aware of how I hold it, so as not to make my wrists sore.

ebooks yo

Figured these doorsteps and their authors were ebook-averse so didn't bother to look.

Hm. They have The Recognitions and Under The Volcano finally.

Xps yeah the dalkey one is the one I have. The musil is a recentish translation published as one volume. Thing is I like long books, but they should at least be portable! These are unnecessarily massive.

The weight thing is also why I haven't tackled the tunnel yet. My heart sank when it arrived.

The Tunnel has been sitting on my shelf for a long time now. Maybe should nominate for ILB reading group.

OTOH see cheap German e-editions of Musil.

I carried that Musil around for ages, it's big but was fine in a bag with umbrella, notepad, just standard really. I guess everyone's commute differs.

Edition of The Recognitions I just peeked at has intro by William Gass in which he conflates his own name with that of Gaddis, William Gibson and a few other Willie Gs

That's the one I've got! I'm a little obsessed with gass actually, devoured omensetter's luck and the stories and the essays and the novellas, everything but the tunnel. He just brought out a third novel, middle c. I hope it's smallish.

I don't commute, but I work at a t€$¢o & my locker simply won't accommodate these monsters. I do a lot of my reading in pubs, and carry a medium-sized tote bag. The huge books just about fit but they're a pain in the arse to lug around & they don't leave a lot of space in the bag. I guess ebooks are the answer, yeah.

I've only read Willie Master's Wife by Gass, but it was really good. I should read his long books as well, at some point, I reckon.

Ismael, re actors and life studies, that's one of the best parts of this collection, which I posted about on What Have You Purchased Lately? (if you look for it, one of AbeBooks' indie merchants had a copy half the price of Amazon's guys)

The Free Southern Theater: A Documentary of the South's Radical Black Theater, with Journals, Letters, Poetry Essays and a Play Written By Those Who Built It starts with an account of an NYC fundraiser, hosted by Harry Belafonte, then back to the often-dangerous boondocks, where this Mississippi-founded troupe brought the shows--- audiences were really on top of Waiting For Godot, for instance.(Later material could be quite different.) Things get suitably complicated (and stay somewhat perilous) in New Orleans, where we also get the most microscopically detailed descriptions of everyday people in the 60s I've ever seen. Actors should always have to go out and write this stuff down; every composition student should. These guys weren't students, just staying sharp, on a working afternoon off. Then on to Planet Texas....really an amazing cache of testimonies, written as or soon after it all happens.

― dow, Tuesday, February 5, 2013 9:28 AM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"Radical Black" is a late tag for this initially integrated company and repertoire. Always necessarily adaptive, The FST was transformed as outside pressures came to include those of/from the increasingly besieged Civil Rights-to-Black Power struggle/paradigm shift

― dow, Tuesday, February 5, 2013 9:45 AM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Raced through Junot Diaz's This Is How You Lose Her at the weekend and loved every second of it; I know he really does only write about one topic (the dominican-american immigrant experience refracted through the lens of men treating women terribly) but he does it so well I don't care.

Started Michel Houellebecq's The Map and the Territory the other night. Don't think I like seeing ultra-modern references in novels yet.

I got an inkling for Diaz yesterday and ordered This Is How You Lose Her, then printed out and devoured Miss Lora over lunch. He is so good. Glad to hear it measures it.

An edition of the Keats letters, as well as Helen Vendler's intimidating The Odes of John Keats.

Vendler seems cool. I wanna read more of her stuff, particularly the book on Yeats and the one on Wallace Stevens' long poems.

I'd like to read those eventually. I thought an interesting comment in the Keats book was her saying that her reading of Keats is influenced by a set of oblique responses to Keats that she discerns in Wallace Stevens. Not sure what that means, as I haven't immersed in Stevens yet.

Left a few off last time, finished a few more

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

Ripped thru this like a thriller, so good. Finally got around to reading just a few weeks before he died, oddly.

Ladies & Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning - Jonathan Mahler

NYC in the nadir year of 1977 as seen thru the Yankees struggles. As a non sports fan I found it effective and engaging. Similar to Will Hermes book on 70s music in NY but better written IMO. Also drawn from secondary sources like Hermes and somewhat distanced as a result.

I finished the Patrick Melrose quartet and that Scientology thing but need to THINK a little before weighing in

Ooh, that NY book sounds interesting. How aware do you need to be of baseball for it to make sense?

'the inheritors' and 'pincher martin' are both great imo.

actually just started 'what god hath wrought' by daniel walker howe which is the book that comes immediately before BCOF in the oxford series, covering roughly rise of jackson to mexican war. a good read so far.

cat are funny because most of them are complete bastards
and yet we love them so much
the human condition

Um, that was supposed to go on the cat thread, perhaps that is obvious.

As long as I'm here, I'm reading The Girls of Slender Means and it's great. My first Spark after The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She's kind of hilarious.

the girls of slender means is a perfect book

She is! Try The Driver's Seat. You can finish it in an afternoon.

reading the final book of a quintilogy aimed at priggish teenagers fifteen years after reading the first four was always going to be a little bit of a let-down. sorry, douglas adams. hope you're chillaxing up there in whatever dimension of heaven you inhabit. the bit with ford prefect in the guide complex was great; anticipated both the matrix and inception. not sure you got entirely to grips with quantum tho. that's ok

back to pynchon. fuck u, really, tommy p; you've ruined comfort reading forever

Re Golding, another vote here for The Inheritors (told from the POV of the last Neanderthals as Homo sapiens sapiens start to take over their world), and also The Paper Men, about a fading, fucked-up writer trying to evade his obsessive biographer.

the girls of slender means is a perfect book

so so so so otm

starting billy budd and other stories tonight - surprisingly little talk on ilx about it

I love Melville's short stories. Esp title story, and I swear barely a day goes by that I do not think about Bartleby the Scrivener

ok awesome can't wait to start. i'm a melville virgin

i liked the short stories but the confidence man is an all-time favourite for me. just a brilliant whimsical blend of detached humour and real philosophical worth.

melville is a treat, I'm envious of you reading him for the first time

just read Without Benefit of Clergy by Kipling, still one of my favourite stories of his. the exposure of those who self-exile.

but speaking of which - bloody hell you lot, and with due regard to James and others not in the northern hemisphere, can we have a summer thread?! I'm sitting here pouring lager down my neck thinking

The sky is lead and our faces are red
And the gates of Hell are opened and riven,
And the winds of Hell are loosened and driven,
And the dust flies up in the face of Heaven

also reading Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances. it's good in a slightly uneven way, but I like the o'er-reaching of her aim.

I started reading The Confidence Man directly after finishing Moby Dick but fell off. I should give it another shot, huh?

we agree with others who say the short stories are the way to go. Try Benito Cereno for starters!

that's the royal 'wd'.

Recently I re-read Ubik and Dr. Bloodmoney, which led to the retrieval of Dick paperbacks and other old books from the depths of my garage.

One of those was Stendhal's selected letters, To the Happy Few -- somewhat repetitious (dude was bored a lot when not in Paris or Milan, and liked to complain about it) but enjoyable anyway.

Just started Arendt's On Revolution; maybe after that, I'll take another look at Camus' The Rebel ... alternatively, I might check out some of the ancient Nebula Award Stories anthologies I found, if I can get past the tiny type and mildew.

lol used to cane those nebula award stories and other collections like it when I was a teenager. uncritical hoovering that nonetheless resulted in an awareness of what was memorable and what was not.

becoming obsessed with Kipling again. the manner of men and the eye of allah are all time.

re: The Confidence Man. If you read each chapter and ignore the footnotes it is extremely readable, then go back and read the footnotes afterward. The first chapter of that book is probably my favourite single chapter of Melville.
http://www.mobydickthewhale.com/melville/confidence-man/chapter-1.htm The Shakespeare chapter is a slog but worth it.

Without Benefit of Clergy is amazing, that paragraph about Nature auditing her accounts with red pencil is unbelievable in the scope of destruction and horror it describes in so brief a passage.

The Confidence Man is so good and so odd; Melville often seems to be coming out of nowhere with these amazing ideas -- his stories are the same, and Bartleby is deservedly loved round these parts

Isn't The Confidence Man supposed to be a takedown of Emerson?

?!?!? I had no idea--admittedly, haven't read much Emerson at all

Without Benefit of Clergy is amazing, that paragraph about Nature auditing her accounts with red pencil is unbelievable in the scope of destruction and horror it describes in so brief a passage.

absolutely. the passage that struck me on this reading was where Holden's butler, who has never touched him before, touches Holden on the elbow and says

Eat, sahib, eat. Meat is good against sorrow. I also have known. Moreover the shadows come and go, sahib; the shadows come and go. These be curried eggs.

It has a force compounded of its symbolic elements - meat, sorrow, shadows, time - the kindness of his butler, of humans generally between whom invisible barriers stand, and the inadequacy of those words - the banality of the curried eggs here, which is somehow the most important element because it is inadequate.

of course the importance to kipling - and his world- of the mundane routine is well known, the required banal, the human bulwark against the terrible metaphysical forces by which we are spared only by fortune, and ultimately never spared in the end. but I thought this stood out for the element of kindness, sometimes lacking in his occasionally stern work dealing with the Gods of the Copybook Headings.

curried eggs available in my local minimart! went for dhal tho.

http://idiocentrism.com/confidence.htm

i feel like i need to read this kipling thing

seriously you guys, vidal's Lincoln is EVERYTHING

and I hate it when people say (x) is everything but this qualifies for a one-off exclamation of jubilation

have you finished it yet VG? i agree that it's awesome. my only two criticisms are: 1) all the stuff with david herold never really comes to life for me and 2) i find vidal's ron paul-ish musings in the epilogue to be a bit difficult to stomach.

Ok i am going to have to read that book. I own a copy already. Thx everyone for sharing your enthusiasm

I am 2/3 of the way through - Sprague just agreed to conspire to ship cotton into the North with his shady Texas friend, and Chase is handwringing over how Lincoln is going to get all the credit for the Emancipation Proclamation and poor Mary has disappeared into constant mourning for poor Willie

I like the David Herold stuff but I do agree that it pales somewhat --- I think maybe because he's more fictional than a lot of the characters? Sometimes I find his personality blends into Hay's

My favorite thing is how he will change rooms, towns, characters multiple times within a chapter without any kind of signposting. It's the most thrilling part for me, that you just up and leave at a moment's notice

The Secret Agent is a good book

i feel like i need to read this kipling thing

damn thomp read kipling.

i've read bits of kipling. er 'kim' and er okay i think probably just 'kim'

yes you should def read the stories, so many great stories.

i wonder if i have a collection somewhere. i know i have the gollancz fantasy one but eh

that one's pretty good. I don't think it's actually that arsed about the stories being fantasy.

like Mary Postgate is in there. There's a lot missing but it's good.

Mary Postgate is fuuuucked. Sorry that's not the literary analysis that is the standard of the this thread but it's true.

A few other classics:
The Knife and the Naked Chalk
the Gardener
Marklake Witches
Dayspring Mishandled
'They'
The Bridge-Builders

it turns out i also have 'wee willie winkie', though i've spent the better part of ten years trying to get myself to the point i can read a book of that title without lapsing into a perpetual snigger and i don't think it's going to happen this week

A Kipling POX (no order)

Wireless
Mrs Bathurst
The Wish House
Dymchurch Flit
The Eye of Allah
Without Benefit of Clergy
'They'
The End of the Passage
The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes
The Keeper of the Traffic

Neil Gaiman wrote a nice introduction to that recent short-story collection, which he said was a belated response to some Sandman fans who were upset about his Kipling fandom -

I wanted to explain to my correspondents why ‘The Gardener’ had affected me so deeply, as a reader and as a writer – it’s a story I read once, believing every word, all the way to the end, where I understood the encounter the woman had had, then started again at the beginning, understanding now the tone of voice and what I was being told. It was a tour de force. It’s a story about loss, and lies, and what it means to be human and to have secrets, and it can and does and should break your heart.

Kipling takes a bit of sorting out, especially his crude habit of writing dialogue in phonetics as blinking neon clues to a character's region and class status, but overall he deserves to be read and enjoyed - even admired.

aimless, have you posted your final thoughts on 2666 yet?

I do even admire him, it's true. in fact I'm so unsorted out myself that I'm afraid to say he might be one of my favourite writers, for his skirt stories solely. he seems to have an almost mystical quality of profusion of detail without surfeit such that implies the presence of the ineffable. a skill normally only seen in good poets.

in other news I am trying to read Pessoa again. despite it being seemingly right up my street I've struggled before but The Book of Disquiet is perfect for me at the moment.

drunkenly read Mrs Frisby & the Rats of NIMH the other night. a favourite of childhood.

final thoughts on 2666

no. I only just got back last night from a camping trip and am still unpacking and such. it's too bad in a way, in that my impressions have faded somewhat. I'll see if I can gather some thoughts on it this weekend. Although tomorrow I am attending a family gathering all day, so it may have to wait a bit longer.

btw, I started The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay while I was out there. A nice convergance of literature and pulp fiction going on there.

Lets lock it plz: WHAT ARE YOU READING SUMMER 2013?