WHAT ARE YOU READING SUMMER 2013?

"Its gonna be 5-0"

Marilynne Robinson - Home.
Also started on Boer's Buru Quartet.

loved "bartleby" but am struggling through some of the shorter pieces, might just skip to "benito cereno" and "billy budd"

Mathias Enard - Zone: so far, great

Orhan Pamuk - Black Book: so far, very good

New Jincy Willett: Amy Falls Down -- enjoyably funny and ill-tempered

Maurice Riordan: The Water Stealer -- poetry collection which mostly seemed OK, except for one wonderful nostalgic poem about smoking which was so good it actually made me want to smoke

xp bartleby is my favorite short story. i haven't read any other melville because i am worried about losing my image of him as this incredibly prescient, proto-existentialist/absurdist writer

...

read more melville ffs

Asking you all here for some help!

My brother will be going to Nashville for 4 months to study with a Derrida prof for his postdoctoral. As a going-away present I would like to give him a 'Great Nashville/Tennessee' novel, if such a novel exists. A novel that is regarded as a classic American novel that is either situated in Nashville or TN, deals with its surroundings, nature etc.

I've shortlisted James Agee's 'A Death in the Family' and Peter Taylor's 'A Summon to Memphis'. The former sounds pretty good, I've not read any of them.

Anyone have any suggestions? It would be greatly appreciated. Bro likes a lot of different things, so don't let the above two force you into thinking into similar books.

Shiloh by Shelby Foote
The Orchard Keeper by Cormac McCarthy (not my favorite of McCarthy's but his first, and it is set in Tennessee)

ps. Faulkner would apply with several books, but he's read all of his books already.

xp

Thanks VG, awes! :-)

I've not read the Foote novel, but you could do worse than have Shelby Foote's voice in your head when you go to Tennessee :)

Wiki says: "The book owes much to William Faulkner in the slow, elegant cadence of its storytelling."

Which is a huge recommendation in my book (npi), so thanks, you awes! :-)

Suttree

It's in Knoxville though.

Nae mind, if it's in TN it counts, thanks!

The 1957 and 2008 editions of A Death In The Family are significantly different--maybe get him both? Here's a comparative study--non-clinical!
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/books/review/Blythe-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Now aside from deciding if I get it or not, I have to decide between editions, thanks a lot man...

(seriously though, thanks!)

Give him a jar and in the jar put a handwritten copy of the Wallace Stevens poem Anecdote of the Jar, which begins... "I placed a jar in Tennessee".

Aimless you magnificent bastard! I might actually do that, too!

<3

Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan - Robin Wood

aimless that's total genius

xp bartleby is my favorite short story. i haven't read any other melville because i am worried about losing my image of him as this incredibly prescient, proto-existentialist/absurdist writer

there is a book, it is about a dude on a monomaniacal quest to kill a universal symbol, maybe you have heard of it

idly flicking thru John Aubrey's The Remains of Gentilisme and Judaisme, basically a collection of regional calendar customs.

Still on Livro de Desassossego, enjoying it, trying to cultivate a touch of Soares-like aesthetic of detachment to my work. sure that will go down well at my next appraisal. (don't speak Portuguese btw, just like writing desassossego.)

Roundhead Reputations by Blair Worden, about Edmund Ludlow, Algernon Sidney, Cromwell and historiography.
Made a little pile of Civil Warrish stuff - Letters and Speeches of Cromwell, Lucy Hutchinson's Life of Colonel John Hutchinson, Richard Baxter's Autobiography. Picking at it, rather than reading through.
Finishing off Ian Donaldson's biography of Ben Jonson. This is good - v readable for something that's more academic than popular.

de sass ass soss ego

I'm now somewhat more than halfway through The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. It is bogging down atm, due to Chabon having set so many plates aspin at once during the first 250pp that he now must rush from one to the other, reanimating each one individually, while leaving all the rest unattended. Still, it is a fun book so far.

apparently i am reading wittgenstein.

i tried to read other things, but they don't stick.

/xp bartleby is my favorite short story. i haven't read any other melville because i am worried about losing my image of him as this incredibly prescient, proto-existentialist/absurdist writer/

there is a book, it is about a dude on a monomaniacal quest to kill a universal symbol, maybe you have heard of it

God bless Captain Save-a-Melville.

I don't even want to think about when I started reading it, but I finally finished reading Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution. I liked the first third or so the best. After that it got a bit drier and almost perfunctory. Now I've started Jerry McGill's Dear Marcus, which is pretty great so far.

at my mum's, flicking through my dad's old socialist/leftist/communist books: The Left in Britain by David Widgery:

These literary delinquents had their parallel in the deviant working class. In the 1956 'Rock and Roll Riots' the kiss-curled middleweight Bill Haley was to unearth a new form of working-class revolt. Teds were a generation of moneyed juveniles who took the new prosperity seriously. Instead of trying to impress boss or parent or teacher, they impressed each other, with speed and noise and clothes and bikes. And rock, which George Melly, who ought to know, described as 'screw and smash music' and the 'Any Questions' panel described as 'the logical progression of jungle music'. Teds were a warning that the calm of Two-Way Family Favourites and Coronation tea caddies would not last for ever. But the dark gremlins who came out bopping in the cinemas got really rough treatment from the police. At the Elephant and Castle post-war kids found out how shallow the new freedom was, that Britain may have been 'Shakin' ALl Over' but there was to be no dancing in the aisles.

That usually clears the halls, thank you.

xpost from sci-fi thread:

Craig Harrison: The Quiet Earth -- 1981 NZ novel, basis for the rather great 1980s film
http://www.listal.com/viewimage/4015515
http://stuffpoint.com/apocalyptic-and-post-apocalyptic-fiction/image/215013-apocalyptic-and-post-apocalyptic-fiction-the-quiet-earth-screenshot.jpg

Man wakes up, finds out everyone else on earth has vanished, due to experiment he was working on and was attempting suicide to escape the effects of

http://i2.listal.com/image/4015515/600full-the-quiet-earth-screenshot.jpg

starring the one and only bruno lawrence! i remember seeing it on tv in the early nineties, probably its sole showing in nz post original release.

just finished perec's a void, and before that alasdair gray's 1982 janine. both excellent.

Been a while since I updated:

Barbara Tuchman - The Guns of August Very interesting and well-balanced account. Fascinating period in history, and I had/have an embarrassing gap of knowledge when it comes to WWI
Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway My first Woolf. I really liked the structure and the characters, and though the writing style did start to grate on me, the book was short enough that I didn't really care.
David Rakoff - Fraud Unbearably pretentious. There's only so many stories about how above it all the author is that one can take in a single sitting.
China Mieville - The City & The City I loved how it started with a seemingly fantasy-ish premise and then slowly broke it down into normal. Just when I thought the story was taking off, it deliberately brought things in, in a way that made it so much better. I did not care for the ridiculous bilingual jargon, and the symbolism was a bit heavy handed, but the premise itself (and the slow reveal) was enough to sell it.

Current:
Kurt Vonnegut - Jailbird This is my first foray into "lesser" Vonnegut, all I've read so far is the widely acknowledged classics.

I finished "Dear Marcus" a few days ago. So nice to read something that can be finished in a few sittings for a change. I recommend it to anyone who can stomach something plainly "inspirational" in intent.

Still on Victor Klemperer, now at July 1941 and here he is in prison. It's amazing that he survives at all, you'd think - but that's what's so interesting about the book, piecing together how the experience of living through Nazi Germany is not exactly congruent with your post-facto history-class understanding of how it would have been. In some ways it's better - nearly halfway through the war and he can still be outspoken and eat out and live an in-some-ways tolerable life - and in some ways worse - the continual low-level shittiness, tax demands, pointless curfews, are particularly dismal.

The year-or-so of internal debate about emigration, the irony was at first overwhelming - don't think twice about buying a slot on the last remaining evacuation ship in 1940, for goodness' sake! - but eventually you can understand. 'If we stay here the regime will end and we need never have left, or it will be the death of us and so at least an end will come; but in America I should be so lonely, and dependent on charity, and not knowing the language' - it doesn't seem like such a wrong choice, the way he puts it.

Baby I Don't Care Lee Server's Robert Mitchum biography which I picked up for 99c sometime last year in a large bunch of books taht I haven't really looked at since. Then I picked this up last week and I'm finding it really interesting. I knew some stuff about him but not everything.
Had seen photos of him in prison denims but didn't know the exact circumstances. Also think I'd hearda bout him hoboing in his youth but nt much beyond so now know a little about that.

Interesting book on an interesting guy.

Edith Pearlman: Binocular Vision

That Mitchum bio is amazing!

"Haut Rodric nodded through the smoke of his first lusty puffs."

I'm re-reading _Foundation_. Turns out I remember nothing about this book, except the few bits that anyone who hasn't read it knows. I enjoy how they frequently speak like Mr Burns. "Stop that infernal coin tossing!" etc. Wasn't sure I was going to finish it, but once I started annotating, it became quite amusing.

"Pirene stirred uneasily, as the muted buzzer upon his desk muttered peevishly."

PS: "'Science be dashed!' swore the other, via a bouncing soldierly oath that ionized the atmosphere."

reread the three foundation books a couple months ago -- i still love them even though the first book is a bit of a slog once you get past the opening and the dialogue is about as hilariously dreadful as you'd expect from a precocious 21-year-old who's trying to rewrite gibbon as science fiction. the stuff with the mule and the second foundation in the second and third books is still gripping, wonderful stuff imo.

Never did read the other two back in the days -- not sure if it's because I didn't like the first enough, or simply because I wasn't resourceful enough to get hold of copies when I was a teenager. In these days of easy interlibrary loan, I may have to consider looking into them.

read the hound of the baskervilles on the plane yesterday. breezy read

Lynne Olson - Those Angry Days, about FDR's trouble in 1940 with the Neutrality Act, Lindbergh, isolationists in Congress.

asimov was 21 when he wrote foundation? that is like woah

like i don't think whatever complex of ideas i had around asimov allowed for him ever being 21

i read his biography when i was a young lad, even vol. 1's photo did not suggest he had ever been 21

He remembered middle & high school pretty clearly though, esp. re the Mule.

Boychild in the Promised Land since I just finished MOsquito which was the book I had to read on bus journeys. This seems pretty interesting a child growing up on the wrong side of the law in Harlem at a time I'm not 100% sure of . So far he's been shot sent to hospital and the the reform school . & is going back over learning to play hookey from about the 2nd day of school and eventually catting out for weeks on end.

I've also read the 1st 100+ pages of the White Goddess which is really interesting. Bought this about 3 years back after meaning to read it for longer. Think I might get I, Claudius for future reading since it';s by the same guy.
Also want to find my copy of the Golden Bough and read that since I've had it somewhere for years.

Lathe of Heaven is so good

finally have a night or two free, gonna finish "seymour" again

LeGuin is great. it's true I don't meet too many people who share this enthusiasm. my wife, for ex., who is into women-in-sci-fi in general (Anne McCaffrey especially) finds her too dry.

based off of the speculative fiction poll from a year or two ago, i also read Left Hand of Darkness and the Disssposssesssed last year! both outstanding, of course. i also read 7/9th of the Earthsea Trilogy (quit about a 1/3 of the way into the third entry). extreme minority opinion - i was underwhelmed. i suppose if i would have read them as an adolescent i'd be more enthusiastic. i understand that she was writing for a younger audience, but they feel a little sterile and dumbed down compared to her later stuff.

also based on ilx hivemind, i just finished Book of the New Sun. i need to put my meager thoughts on it in the appropriate thread, but my pared down reaction is that i thought it was pretty outstanding until the 4th and final book, when gene wolfe actually begins to reveal all these secrets that he's built up throughout the prior books. still very much worth reading, and for some reason i think it would make an excellent animated film (a thought that's never really occurred to me while reading anything, curiously).

currently reading the Genealogy of Morals

for some reason i think it would make an excellent animated film

strongly disagree here. details that are hinted at in the book would be sledgehammer obvious if presented visually. this is one of the things that's so great about Wolfe as a stylist, this accretion of contextual clues

i could never finish earthsea 3 either but weirdly i really really loved the second one which seems to be considered the slightest (i mean, it literally is). the terror + excitement of illumination. i've never read anything else cuz i can never choose between lathe and dispossessed and then i pick someone else up. one thing i liked about portland was leguin's status as patron saint, up in the hills.

i like the second earthsea best too, and i agree the third is a bit of a downer, but it's totally worth carrying on to the end of the series. the fourth one is incredibly bleak and basically a complete rejection of the patriarchal world she herself created, but then in the fifth one she manages to achieve a wonderful reconcilation. as a picture of an author struggling with her own creation, and then coming out the other side with something even richer than before, i can't think of an equal.

Just bought Escott's bio of Hank Williams in its '95 edition. So been wondering what got updated in the 2005 version.
Hadn't been aware of the book before I saw it yesterday so wasn't aware that it had various updated versions. Looks like it might be pretty good, just wondering what revelations i could be missing in not having the latest version. Anybody know?

I am re-reading Goodbye to All That, the memoir of Robert Graves (at age 33). I read it first about 35 years ago, so it seems pretty new to me.

Lot of juicy book reviews in September 14-15 WSJ. I'll prob get Professor Borges, edited from transcriptions of J.L.'s classroom ruminations: one fan's distinctively contoured canonverse of English Lit http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323681904578641731894981070.html#mod=todays_us_

Also, Alan Massie describes five faves: Rebecca West's The New Meaning of Treason (didn't know about the 1981 edition--who did she add?), Sam Tanehaus's magneticWhittaker Chambers, Graham Greene's The Human Factor and the only one I'd never read or heard of, Eric Linklater's The Dark of Summer. Massie considers him one of the finest Scottish novelists. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324123004579056854022180782.html#mod=todays_us_

And I should mention Daniel Woodrell, since Sam Sacks' appealing review of The Maid's Version quotes Dennis LeHane: "Woodrell is the least known major writer in the country." Alas, Sacks also agrees with Scott Seward's take on Tom Perrotta) (haven't read this collection, but thought The Leftovers was compelling)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324549004579067120458059600.html#mod=todays_us_

and OMG, I've gotta get Alan Taylor's The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832, and John Milton Cooper Jr.'s 2008 Woodrow Wilson bio, considering the WSJ reviewer's comparison of it to A. Scott Berg's new 'un--just go read all these reviews!

oops Massie xp also chooses A Perfect Spy, which I haven't read, though enjoyed the mini-series.

Latest stuff: http://humanizingthevacuum.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/she-had-no-ambition-to-write-a-good-book-but-was-painfully-anxious-to-write-a-book-that-the-critics-should-say-was-good/

Just finishing up Quicksand by Nella Larsen tonight. Perfectly readable, and probably of great historical import, but as a narrative it's awfully repetitive.

Reread Iain Sinclair's White Chappel Scarlet Tracings on a whim. Started off at an enjoyable canter but got thoroughly bogged down and bored by the end. Love his prose at the sentence level but really don't give a crap about what he has to say - all the highly cryptic magickal psychogeography mumbo-jumbo can shove it tbh, and the surface narrative is highly insular and entirely lacking in heart.

Might give Radon Daughters another go some day, was my introduction to IS and it blew me away at the time.

Yeah, I like sentence-level Sinclair very much, but get worn out over the course of a book. I'm not sure I've actually finished a book by him ever (apart from Lud Heat).

Been all over the shop recently, reading scattershot in big multi-author histories that I have on the iPad - Oxford History of English Lexicography, Oxford History of the Book in Britain, etc. Also Diarmaid Macculloch's History of Christianity, slowing on that now I've hit the reformation and more-or-less know the plot and characters.

And I read How Should a Person Be? and The Flamethrowers on holiday a couple of weeks ago. Both good, but liked the former more than the latter.

Starting new Pynchon. Will report in appropriate thread.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Kind of perfect in its way - rainy, claustrophobic, doom-laden Cold War vibes, relentless momentum and a suitably cynical conclusion. Hit genre novels had much better prose in 1963. I can see why Graham Greene dug it.

finished the first simon raven, debating purchase of second simon raven (e.g. next four novels)

maybe next i can read fucking strangers and brothers, ferchrissakes

just finished gil amelio's "on the firing line." gonna go for "the road" next, which i think i might've already read years ago

Picked up the Phillip Pullman book on the 2 Jesuses since it was lying unfinished on the bed near me when I woke up and started reading taht for a while. Pretty interesting but I keep winding up with more and more books on the go.
Disorder but eventually I may have half read more books than anybody else?

Harvey. The film is my go-to cheerer upper and the script is nice and breezy too. Only trouble is that when I read it on the bus I end up inviting everyone for some informal drinks...

Reread Iain Sinclair's White Chappel Scarlet Tracings on a whim

Only bits of this that are actually good are the book-runner bits. Sinclair is a pain in the arse.

finished the first simon raven, debating purchase of second simon raven (e.g. next four novels)

From memory, the second volume of 4 are the best ones

If you thought that the Savage Detectives was just okay is it worth the investment to read 2666? It's sitting on my shelf taking up room - perhaps I only bought it because I liked the cover, I don't know. I actually don't know anything about it, other than that Bolano can really write.

Finding it weirdly difficult to get into books at the moment. What do you guys do when this happens? Dip into an old favourite? Half-tempted to plough through an Adrian Mole in bed tonight and then pick up one of the dozen barely-started books on the floor.

White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings is one of my favourite novels. If you can't get with the 'magickal psychogeographic mumbo-jumbo', though, you're not going to like it at all. Calling it heartless misses the point; it is concerned with forces that feed on heart. Provided you accept that form is content amassed, his prose goes a long way to fulfilling the novel's aims.

If you thought that the Savage Detectives was just okay is it worth the investment to read 2666?

Definitely. I like SD but felt much more involved in 2666.

Speaking of which I watched that (terrible) movie Now You See Me last night, and lol at the random shot of Woody Harrelson chilling on the couch reading The Savage Detectives.

I just finished Good-bye to All That last night. It had a disarming sort of innocence about it, as if it were a very long letter from a school chum, that may partly explain its popularity when it was published. Among other things, it makes clear just how small and clubby the intellectual circle of Britain was at the time. Speaking as a dust mote from the far provinces of a vast country, I find this state of things nearly incomprehensible, like a serf trying to imagine St. Petersburg.

I should also mention that I finished The Runaway Brain a week or so ago. The writer assembled an impressive array of theories and the facts which underpin them, but failed to give the book enough structure to rise to an equally impressive height. I did learn some interesting stuff, though.

Finding it weirdly difficult to get into books at the moment. What do you guys do when this happens? Dip into an old favourite? Half-tempted to plough through an Adrian Mole in bed tonight and then pick up one of the dozen barely-started books on the floor.

That sounds like a good plan tbh. I'm on a proper dry spell - just four read so far this year - but I picked up Fever Pitch and breezed through it easily enough. It hasn't got me back into books right enough, but I've got enough going on atm that I'm not worrying (yet).

I go through those 'why don't I read this every day' periods more and more. Usually the pattern is 1. try to read big 'classic' book why I'm not mentally equipped for it, either by being to busy, tired or stupid. 2. God, I need something I don't have to think about. What did I do with my Clive Barkers (my favourite pop novelist) 3. Why do I read anything else. 4. Clever and pretty people make fun of me when I tell them what I've been reading recently. and then it's back to 1.

Easy solution: lie about what you've been reading lately. Make it so esoteric that it stops all further inquiry.

It's a close cousin to the 'good book epiphany' when something really grabs you and you wander if you actually liked all those other books you read.

I try that Aimless. "Did you like the end" "well, can a novel even have an end?" "Well, when the guy died..." "spiritually, you mean? I was thinking more of the achronological journey through western ideas" "don't tell me you're lying about having read John Waynes biography dowd..."

Maybe tell people you're reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Especially if they are Jehovah's Witnesses trying to give you a cartoon pamphlet about hell.

If the questions get prickly, tell them you only started reading it yesterday.

I do this in pubs. As a social defence in my (quiet, newspaper friendly local) I find that new-marxism, psychoanalysis or just plain old pornography works pretty well for projecting that "I'm here because I feel guilty drinking myself blind at home, and I'm reading something I hate so that I feel entitled to drink double whiskeys rather than shandy" facade.

Actually came around to liking Nella Larsen's Quicksand by the time I finished it. Class discussion yesterday really helped illuminate it.

Onto Northanger Abbey for the Austen course!

When I can't get into novels very easily and don't want to fall back on non-fiction or magazines I jumpstart my enthusiasm by revisiting a good book of essays — usually James Wood or Martin Amis's The War Against Cliche. It gets me excited about literature again, then I start with a short, accessible classic. I tend to think that if I can't even handle the nursery slopes of a novella I should hang my head.

How do you get over reader's block?

Picked up Patrick DeWitt's Ablutions for 20p on the way home from work...seems nice and breezy, going to give it a real go tonight. Though Adrian is still tempting me.

Ahhh, this is great: dirty realist kinda stuff set in a run down Hollywood bar. Essentially it's a set of vignettes in which the narrator - an alcoholic/aspirin/cocaine addict with hepatitis c and an unhappy wife - details the various lowlifes who frequent the bar. DeWitt's style is great; I mean you can obvious join the dots between him and the writers that came before him but his eye for detail is top notch. Great use of the second person as well. I know it's an obvious trick to use but it always works on me.

To selfishly return to Ursula La Guin, has anyone read 'Always Coming Home' (think that's what it's called) because I trying to read it in my local at the moment and I can't get past the first page. This could be becuase of the locale, but it's very quiet, or the fact that I'm a bit 'up' at the mo and find it hard to read then. Or it could be because it reads like a cut scene into to a JRPG, and I always skip those. Is it worth progressing with?

The only one of hers so far I haven't liked almost unreservedly, I found it preachy and joyless.

Last night I read about half of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn. It is kind of refreshing to read an extended essay that has been so thoroughly thought out and organized for maximum clarity. Its thesis is so well-argued that its conclusions seem incontrovertible. Yet, at the time, it was a new and original idea. Sweet writing, if you like that sort of thing.

When I can't get into novels very easily and don't want to fall back on non-fiction or magazines I jumpstart my enthusiasm by revisiting a good book of essays — usually James Wood or Martin Amis's The War Against Cliche. It gets me excited about literature again

Terrific strategy. I'm the same: an essay collection or poetry (this week it's Seamus Heaney's The Spirit Level).

picked up zola's 'therese raquin' on a whim last night -- i bought it (also on a whim) last year and promptly forgot about it. about halfway through now, it's a page-turner. kind of shockingly racy and explicit for a 19th century book. violent, too -- there's a harrowing description of a drowned corpse that could be right out of stephen king or something.

Just bought Escott's bio of Hank Williams in its '95 edition. So been wondering what got updated in the 2005 version.
Hadn't been aware of the book before I saw it yesterday so wasn't aware that it had various updated versions. Looks like it might be pretty good, just wondering what revelations i could be missing in not having the latest version. Anybody know?