what? are you reading? autumn 2013

Marguerite Yourcenar-

Memoirs of Hadrian.

So good.

bleeding edge. at last an east coast vineland

Good?

I just finished The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn. I'm looking at several possibilities for my next book. Feel free to chime in with your pick of the bunch:

Willehalm, Wolfram von Eschenbach (Penguin ed., tr. Gibbs & Johnson).
A Short History of Byzantium, Norwich.
The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles.
The Tale of the Heike, tr. Royall Tyler.
The Girls of Slender Means, Muriel Spark.

Working through "interpreter of maladies" by Jhumpra Lahiri

Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford. Way fun! Too bad she didn't kill Hitler.

Still on Klemperer's Diaries, just reached 1943.

http://www.boffinsbookshop.com.au/images/covers/300/9781846141492.jpg

Just gave up halfway through the third volume of Le Guin's _Earthsea_ books. I dunno how I made it that far, tbh, as I wasn't enjoying it much at all. Guess I'm too old and cranky for this stuff. I did enjoy parts, but I suspect this might have been more fun when I was thirteen.

Just started Jorge Amado's _Tereza Batista_
Found this at a local thrift shop right after reading an article about the new Penguin Classics editions of Amado. Felt I *had* to get it because of that. .This book isn't one of the reissued set, however.
The Norwegian translation is pretty great, thanks to the old-fashioned language and slang that you never hear anymore ("Flyfille"! "Rekel"! "Ranglefant!" "Flottenfeier"!) I've read other books by the same translator that didn't have this quality, so I'm gonna assume it's appropriate.

I launched into Girls of Slender Means last night. Apart from it being drily funny, it is nice to read a novel that isn't 800+ pp. long. I should finish it tonight.

Spark's a wonderful argument for a book of <200p being capable of perfection

"Why is he in love with Selina by the way?" Rudi said. "Why doesn't he find a woman of character or a French girl?"

^^ this has been ripped from its full context, but it made me laugh out loud. I finished The Girls of Slender Means last night, as predicted. It was a lovely brief excursion into Sparks's world.

Now I've picked up Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges in the fairly recent Penguin edition with Andrew Hurley as the translator. I will likely plow through as many stories as seem to fit my mood, possibly the whole collection. I dipped into The Tale of the Heike briefly and it wasn't doing anything for me, so I put it back down.

John Keenan - The First World War
Conrad - Nostromo (rereading)

Thomas Bernhard - President and On The Eve of Retirement. Why did I ever stop reading plays! The latter especially is brutal. Don't think either worked as well. And while I doubt there'll be a production soon enough I am trying to be convinced in the big corrupt societal symbolic character: a president or a judge. Too blank a shock effect, but for me its often the old guy railling against it all, or a friend of a friend who has committed suicide talking about lives wasted...those have that window into a dour private world that is perfect novelistic material (or carry with it a certain type of attraction). Now if he somehow converted that into drama for a stage...needs more investigation.

2666 so good. Just gorged (perhaps the wrong word here) on the mix of Boccaccio/Arabian Nights and Pedro Paramo, whose reference I missed the first time round but so fkn true.

Gonna re-read Rabelais - Thomas Urquhart trans., of course.

Picking up Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte on sat.

You might want to look into Bernhard's short play _Einfach Kompliziert_. There doesn't seem to be a published English translation, but I found this translation through google. I cannot vouch for its quality.
It's about a retired actor sitting in his room and being Bernhardy and old. tbh I don't remember it very well.

I'm in the middle of Richard Stark's _The Seventh_. I've been getting these one at a time, reading one every few months -- kinda tempted to order a bunch and gorge. To think I didn't think I liked crime fiction.

Thanks Oynstein its doing the trick:

walks over to the nail he has most recently hammered down and contemplates it

bernhard is such a badass, love that guy

i'm currently reading white teeth. it's so much fun!

I'm reading "Country Of My Skull" by Antjie Krog, a book about the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in post-Apartheid South Africa. Powerful stuff.

I read Desmond Tutu's book on them a while ago. Also very good, but included victim's recollections of torture that I wish I hadn't read.

i read 'leaving the atocha station'

i don't know if i didn't get it or if it was just ok

Blaise Cendrars - Moravagine

finished 'therese raquin' by zola and picked up 'stern' by bruce jay friedman.

Rereading "Nostromo" and picked up Keegan's history of WWI.

You told us yesterday but thanks

Another week, another Austen. This week: Sense and Sensibility

also reading David Byrne's How Music Works and making just as slow progress with that as everything else

Finished the deWitt - absolutely adored it, best thing book I've read in a while.

Made my first visit to my new local library (Peckham) and got on a whim got two easy reads out: Grow Up by Ben Brooks and Martin Amis' Lionel Asbo.

Read the Brooks in one sitting...coming of age stuff a la Skins about a few bored suburban drug taking/booze drinking/older woman shagging 17 year olds who are all knowingly fucked up in nice middle class ways. As my own teenhood was one of abstinence I couldn't connect to this kind of thing but it was a fun-ish romp around school trips and house parties. He was alt lit's UK hotshot for a bit so it's very Tao Lin tonally. I've got a soft spot for books about teenage boys so there was some pleasure to be had. Can't help but remind of me Joe Dunthorne's (far superior) Submarine.

About 20 pages into Lionel Asbo and am embarrassed/repulsed by it.

Lots of theory articles for college - Freud, Benjamin, reader-response theory (Fish, Iser, Jauss)

This was a terrific book and everyone should read it.

Boethius - The Consolation of Philosophy

TCoP = sometimes you're up and sometimes you're down, so try not to get all het up about it, bcz it all comes out in the wash.

i got the new stephen king! maria and rufus got me a gift certificate to the local little book store otherwise i never would have got it. don't think i've read anything by him since insomnia! also got the ted chiang collection that i've been looking at in that store for three years. three years!

if you buy a book there you get to pick out a free old advance publisher's copy from a shelf. uncorrected proofs and all that. almost went for a nick tosches vampire book but took a bruce wagner novel instead.

http://www.gdprice.com/j/24488.JPG

oops hueg sorry, I just really like that cover

I'm now about halfway through A Short History of Byzantium, aka 1200 Years of Revolving Door Emperors in only 400pp.

Finished the new Atwood (not nearly as bad as some of the reviews made it out to be) and started The Orphan Master's Son, pretty great so far.

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

A nice break from all of the Austen.

madame bovary

that boll reminds me of some publisher's old stanislaw lems

i read 'the virgin suicides' and h8d it

Curzio Malaparte - Kaputt. Exaggerated tales from the WWII told by Malaparte to generals, diplomats, women. Has some inspired imagery but I wasn't exactly fired up to finish it.

Platonov - The Foundation Pit. Gets better everytime, on a sentence by sentence level you're almost relieved by dialogue, so many of the descriptions and scenes and charactersation are overloaded with these dense oddities that are a lot of fun and are tempted to get drunk in. The dialogue has these various characters (cardboard cutouts but they are more than one dimensional if not quite the full 3D, you realise he revels in deforming their humanity) doing soviet-speak, which is fine for me as I know quite a lot of it. Merciless on Soviet 'logic', pushes it to extremes, investigates the implications.

Byzantium fell a couple of nights ago. It was an impoverished mess by then anyway. I filled in the now-empty place it occupied by reading some of Tolstoy's essays, which mainly revolve around his religious convictions. These seemed somewhat disordered and naive in their details, but his main thrust (practise non-violence, simplicity and compassion) seems worthy enough.

wins, let me know how the Bøll novel is. I've tried this man several times and failed.

Curzio Malaparte - Kaputt

me too..

and i love it.
especially the irony of it.

Yeah its good - I think I'm losing my ability to come to read new authors at all. I am at this re-read what I know 'phase', more than ever.

So I'm re-reading Rabelais, revelling in the density amongst the talk about wine. Not so weirdly wanting to go from that to Gravity's Rainbow again, but I sold my copy a while back.

reading the two new cesar aira translations from new directions, "the hare" and "shantytown." i really liked "the story of how i became a nun" but "the hare," so far, seems really different from that. the prose for one thing is on the dense side in the beginning: long paragraphs about a colonialist's confused, sleepy thought processes. anyone here a fan of aira?

I read 'Ghosts' and really enjoyed it. I wouldn't say the prose was dense at all, but lots of day-to-day life and sleepy thought processes, shot through with weirdness.

'How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position' by Tabish Khair: very entertaining novel about three guys from India/Pakistan living in a share flat in Denmark.

I am now rereading (after a few decades) Xenophon's Anabasis, in translation, of course. My Attic Greek extends about as far as could cover up half a flea.

Looking for some nice essay collections for Christmas, anything good come out this year?

oh, also, my first book's just come out on Hato Press/Bronze Age:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ba5VauwCcAApNBF.jpg

Congrats!

Uh, I haven't read any recent essay collections, but the ones I want to get are _My 1980s & Other Essays_ by Wayne Koestenbaum and _The Hall of Uselessness_ by Simon Leys.

A lot of people have praised _This Is Running for Your Life_ by Michelle Orange. The opening essays looks like it might be an expanded version of this one FADE TO ORANGE: The Theory of Receptivity and Some Thoughts on Ethan Hawke’s Face

I reread _Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde_ this weekend and wanted more -- so I've started reading _Treasure Island_. I'm really enjoying it! I should have read this half a century ago.
Also digging Nabokov's _Pnin_ and kinda picking at a prose translation by W. R. J. Barron of _Sir Gawain & the Green Knight_. It's fun to recognize some Norwegian words in the original text.

RLS was a pretty smooth operator. When his imagination is fully engaged and he's in top form, he slides down as easily as oysters on the half shell.

Treasure Island is great infectious fun. I'm sure many thriller writers have learned from its pacing.

I am currently reading a philosophical work by Rudolf Christoph Eucken entitled "Can We Still Be Christians?". Mr. Eucken has the distinction of being the least read Nobel-laureate on Goodreads, with only 3 ratings (all 2 stars, poor guy). It's pretty damn tough to get through.

Problem word in that title: We.

really loved 'treasure island' when i finally read it a couple years ago on an otherwise miserable work trip. silver is a great character -- you really do kinda root for him to get away at the end.

Norman Mailer - The Executioner's Song. Man, I read sixty pages in one sitting. Far less daunting a task than its size led me to believe, said the man to his date.

Szerb's Journey by Moonlight

Good range here, a fair amount mentioned on What Are You Reading? threads (wish it was Rolling; hell with having to search the seasonals)
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/12/best-books-of-2013-part-one.html?utm_source=tny&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailyemail&mbid=nl_Daily%20%2877%29

Just finished the Philip Pullman The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, which was interesting enough.

Wondering what fiction to start on now. Do I give Gravity's Rainbow another attempt? Moby Dick? Consider Phlebas? The Wonderboys? The Prince? THe Man In THe High Castle?

reading the secret life of plays by steve waters - kind of to help me with drama writing i'm doing but it's an interesting read nonetheless. also reading a lot of plays, recently got through translations and faith healer by brian friel, the first and most recent compilation of conor mcpherson plays (with rum an vodka, the weir etc) and am about to start on woyzeck, plus some martin crimp.

A close friend has a truly great story in the new issue of American Short Fiction, which makes me very happy: http://americanshortfiction.org/2013/11/03/annie-radcliffe-you-are-loved-playlist-2/

@dog latin: The Man In The High Castle is really good, I read it this summer.

this book is kicking my arse right now

http://fckvrso.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/aesthetics-and-politics.jpg

ilx book

Currently into Peter Brown /The Body and Society Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity / right now.

waggish's year-end list is making me insanely book-hungry.

god, had exactly the same response. catching up on yesterday's news here tho:

All Souls - Javier Marias

I'm not sure I made anything out of this. anyone make a case for it?

The Savage Detectives - Bolaño

This is really good!

Some Leskov. didn't enjoy when I was reading but turning it over in my mind think it was better than I thought it was, and I just wasn't in the mood.

Saintsbury is v amusing and otm generally.

started Skylark by Dezső Kosztanyi. enjoying so far.

Thought I'd read the Wizard of Oz since i never have before and I'd read something about it being an allegory for American financial change in terms of going to a banknote based system or something.
It was simplified to some degree for the film and various scenes cut out. Will hopefully finish it tomorrow then I can say that i've read it at least. It's interesting but it does seem to be a children's book
Also thinking about Mary Poppins after hearing some interesting stuff about esoteric thought that PL Travers included in an article which came out in the wake of Saving Mr Banks.

Also reading a book on the philosopher's Stone where the author tries to find out about alchmey in various cultures. He's visited China & India so far.

& H.P.Lovecraft the Classic Stories which is an annotated version compiling several of the core stories. Interesting stuff, shame he was a bit of a Nazi sympathiser type but that does seem to have triggered teh thought behind the stories.

The Save Detectives is the one book by Bolano that didn't hang together too well for me. Should revisit.

Like to get round to Leskov someday.

@Michael B - cheers, I read the first chapter in the summer and enjoyed it but got distracted and started something else for some reason. Have picked it up again and I'm glad for it.

Been reading volume 1 of Knausgaard's "My Struggle". One of the most realistic depictions of what it's like to be an adolescent boy that I can remember.

fizzles p much everything i enjoyed about 'all souls' was stuff i got out of reading it in retrospect of 'your face tomorrow' i think? that and a certain bitchyness of tone, i guess, that went into it. the weird spinoff 'dark back of time' also p good i think

I finished Xenophon's Anabasis last night. It obviously contains a bunch of special pleading on the author's own behalf, and it probably contains a multitude of inaccuracies concerning the details of the expedition because it was written perhaps 30 years after the fact, but regardless of these shortcomings it provides a fascinating window on that moment in greek and persian history. It's a ripping yarn.

Needing another book to fill in the remainder of the evening, I picked up a source book *slash* textbook on the slave wars of ancient Rome and started in on it. It gathers every snippet of ancient text mentioning the slave wars or throwing important light on the slave culture of Rome.

Well damn---title of that slave wars book please!

Spartacus and the Slave Wars: A Brief History with Documents.

Mixing Szerb w/the Third vol. of Man w/out Qualities

I finished Bill Buford's Among The Thugs, mostly on football hooliganism, which turned out terrific. I had been concerned at first when it started out as naive-foreigner-flounders-among-silly-brits, which wasn't quite what I wanted, but it snapped into focus and raised itself another level on at least three separate occasions, very impressively - once when silly gave way to actual violence; then in getting into crowd psychology; and finally, horribly, when talking about Hillsborough. I've read enough about Hillsborough this year and didn't really want any more, but thankfully he didn't take it on directly. There were other standouts too, a National Fr0n7 disco and a riot in Cagliari in particular - it was all good stuff, only a weak ending letting it down a touch at the last.

Have you read Hunter Thompson's Hell's Angels? Now there's an ending, and not the one he could've planned. It's got the same pull as the Buford, and sharply, succinctly pre-"gonzo" (though def off the social map, or further than most book-length journo journeys went, even in the mid-60s).

I haven't. I went through a Thomson phase a few years back but eventually got gonzoed out. Though he's a great writer, and if the gonzo is in check that sounds interesting.

i read the intro to 'the decline of the west'

i must have read it years ago, sort of suspicious that spengler was some kind of nutjob

but it is surprisingly reasoned-sounding, considering that it is after all an attempt to discern the hidden secret of western history

quite eloquent, too

starting c.s. lewis's space trilogy

Now that I finished the book about Spartacus and the slave wars, I've begun to read The First Poets by Michael Schmidt, about the ancient greek poets, starting with Orpheus.

Anonymity is pretty essential if anyone's going to get any useful feedback I think, though it is good to know who wrote what afterwards so there can be a conversation. TBH as it's fragments we're posting it's not such a problem having a public board, but a private one would be useful for longer/complete pieces.

Not that I have anywhere near enough stuff at the moment but, where ever it happened, I would do this monthly if everyone else could be bothered – would be a good incentive to write and improve! Six month gap kills momentum a little bit...

wrong board – ignore , sorry !

Antonio Di Benedetto- Zama

So good

Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned - Wells Tower. Very lucidly written, but each story was like picking a huge scab off your arm and watching blood bubble up.

Started - actually, was nearly finished - Miss Lonleyhearts but lost my copy in the first nightclub I've been to in more than a year.

Taking a book to a nightclub is excellent. My writing teacher used to grab a table, whip out his notebook and scrawl through the night's revelry.

Is that a criticism, re: Wells Tower?

The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter which I'm a few chapters into. Found it in a charity shop last week. Not sure what other Pratchett collaborations I've read. Definitely read Good Omens.
Anyway, interesting idea, or reexamination of an existing trope, so far executed pretty well. Throws up several ideas and shows why they wouldn't work in this situation.
I'm enjoying it, good payback for €1. Hadn't realised it was from last year until just now though.

Still slowly reading the book on the Philosopher's Stone I've had on the go for a while.

Also the H.P.Lovecraft Great Horror Stories collection which I'm also going through slowly. Like the annotations.

Problem with The Long Earth is it doesn't really end up going anywhere, and not quite interesting enough to make you pick up the sequels to see if there's apay-off there instead. Has some good ideas though.

Any ilx0rzzz who want to buy my book for a loved one this xmas can do so here...

http://bronze-age.net/RNB-EDITS.html

Is that a criticism, re: Wells Tower?
Probably not, no! It's very good, but I was probably wanting to read Wodehouse or something else at the time I picked it up.

c.s. lewis - perelandra

george orwell - homage to catalonia
paul celan - glottal stop

The Invention of Love by Tom Stoppard. Love this play. Saw it on first run, had been meaning to read it for a long time.

Picked it up because I'd been thinking about Wilde a bit (the play's about Housman; Wilde's like his shadow or complement throughout) - reread some of the prose & started the Ellmann biography. Was a bit hesitant, because I remember it taking me an age to read at 16, & I don't really like biographies, especially the early bits about family history. I forget whether we're talking about the grandfather or the father or some uncle or whatever. And addresses, not really interested in addresses. But it's great, it's burning through that stuff in a few pages, very readable. I think I might have tarred Ellmann with the Michael Holroyd brush. He is boring. Killed Shaw for a generation!

Jeremias Gotthelf 'The Black Spider' and James Hanley's 'Boy'. Both excellent, especially the Gotthelf.

Igor Vishnevetsky: Leningrad

Hanley's 'Boy' nearly killed me with sadness

It is indeed heartbreakingly sad. Just when you think things can't get much bleaker, it takes a turn for the worse.

Dashiell Hammett's _The Maltese Falcon_. I think my main pleasure in this one is the lingo:
“[T]hey got him once in New York for knocking over a row of studs-games – his twist turned him up – and he was in a year before Fallon got him sprung. A couple of years later he did a short hitch in Joliet for pistol-whipping another twist that had given him the needle […]” (page 500 in the Picador _The Four Great Novels_ omnibus)

Wish I could remember anything about that Wells Tower book. I think I liked it, but got sick of it towards the end -- then found some relief in the viking story, which felt very different from the rest of the book. I'm just awful at remembering short story collections. All I remember of this one was the vikings & carnies. And possibly one about a teenage girl meeting some skeezy dude in the woods and drinking pond-beer. Does he kill her? Hrmm, I might be mixing it up with Bergman's _Virgin Spring_.