'I FALL upon the spines of books! I read!' -- Autumn 2014: What Are You Reading?

don't spoil the ending for us

You will all begin again from page one, I can tell.

Elena Ferrante - The Story of a New Name. So so amazing.

Now onto Elio Vittorini - Women of Messina.

Big Flannery score:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/books/university-acquires-flannery-oconnors-papers-and-effects.html?_r=0

Cool, thanks. Feel like the physical building those things end up in should be guarded by peacocks. If not live ones then at least artistic renditions thereof.

Didn't read the comments, know what to expect there, but prevention seems increasingly unlikely, esp. considering the price, in several senses, incl. the gamble of efficacy---no, we shouldn't give up, but
/a big part of what holds us together as purposive agents is this assumption that mankind will live on significantly after our deaths, and that this belief is actually much more psychologically crucial than beliefs about personal survival after death./ seems to require whatever recycling of hope, wherever it can be found (and to each his own)

going back to the guardian article though, the comments are so infuriating. people seem so smug -- almost giddy -- about humanity's imminent extinction due to our greed or selfishness or other moralistic terms. they act like they're not implicated in it at all and also never ask the question if the risks of trying to develop an industrial civilization were worth it considering the potential it allows (never fully realized) for many people to live very well.

I know what you mean, but I've done everything I can do as an individual, and frankly I have o% confidence any governments are going to do the right thing, so giddy joy at the inevitable demise of all the fuckwits who have actively fought against doing anything to save the pklanet is all I have left

Dutch government is trying to do the right thing, for obvious reasons.

fair point. i live in Australia, however, which no longer even has a climate change policy, due to being run by genuinely evil fuckheads. anyway, back to books...

just finished portugal in european and world history by malyn newitt

for a small country portugal has had some interesting leaders

i was v much not into the last idk how many pages of proust

I am continuing with Foote's Civil War history. His Confederate sympathies are emerging more distinctly as Robert E. Lee enters the scene and the south begins to win more battles. Now that we're deeper into the campaigns of 1862, he tends to lionize the Confederate generals and army rather unabashedly. :(

Buddenbrooks -- at last.

Even the "masked ball" passage, Thomp?

Couple of jazz books I picked up yesterday. Jazz People by Val Wilner where I read the Babs Gonzales piece and a book of interviews from around 1970 called Note by Note or something

Even the "masked ball" passage, Thomp?

― one way street, Saturday, 11 October 2014 20:30 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the masked ball is good but still maybe the third best party of the parties. the one at the end is the worst party.

i have been reading SHORT BOOKS: clive bell's 'art', richard hughes' weird docu-novel 'in hazard', lars iyers's 'spurious'

Making a bit of progress in The Arabian Nights. I always really enjoy it but can't ever seem to keep up a steady pace.

I read one night a night for 2½ years.

Maybe I'll do that. The way I read, if Shahriyar had my attention span, Scheherazade wouldn't have lasted long.

no xbox in olden days

Elena Ferrante - Days of Abandonment.

I loved Vittorini's Conversation in Sicily but found Women of Messina tough going wrt writing, and Days of Abandonment was sitting there. Picked that up, loved it from the first sentence on page one (so connect with her voice) that I couldn't go back to Vittorini. Gave that back to the library.

I just picked up a copy of Capital in the Twenty-First Century on a 14 day loan from the library. I will not be able to renew it, because of the high demand. I will certainly not finish it in 14 days. But I do intend to interrupt my civil war odyssey long enough to evaluate whether or not to invest in my own copy of this.

I often drift toward fiction about complicated friendships between women, so I've been meaning to read Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend series. I've started the revised American edition of Sheila Heti's How Should A Person Be?, and I'm not sure yet whether I can simply find "Sheila" and her friends smug and vacuous or whether I should admire Heti's verve in fictionalizing herself as smug and vacuous even in her soul-searching (after all, any number of male novelists have been lionized for dramatizing their abrasive qualities). In either case, so far it seems flimsy in comparison to Chris Kraus's I Love Dick--maybe that's an unfair comparison, but both novels seem to explore similar questions. I've also started Bolaño's Little Lumpen Novelita, which seems more promising. I've recently finished Jeanne Thornton's The Dream of Doctor Bantam, which is mordantly funny, vivid in evoking mid-2000s Austin, and incisive about mourning and doomed relationships.

revised how?

Apparently Heti smoothed out some of the novel's transitions and elaborated on the circumstances leading up to Sheila's divorce:
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/07/27/two-versions-one-heti/
http://www.themillions.com/2012/06/how-should-a-writer-be-an-interview-with-sheila-heti.html

hunh. guess that's the version i read! who knew!

read 'the graveyard' by marek hlasko last night in one sitting. a classic polish novel, something i picked up on a whim at elliott bay books in seattle last month. wonderful read, will definitely seek out more of his stuff.

Making a bit of progress in The Arabian Nights. I always really enjoy it but can't ever seem to keep up a steady pace.

― jmm, Sunday, October 12, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I read one night a night for 2½ years.

― Frederik B, Sunday, October 12, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Maybe I'll do that. The way I read, if Shahriyar had my attention span, Scheherazade wouldn't have lasted long.

― jmm, Sunday, October 12, 2014 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The one I've read is the Haddawy translation (as you can see from the link its a reconstruction from the earliest text, sounds like a fool's game) but for me it gave the flavour for that spider web of a prose. In my mind you could see what both Boccaccio and Proust got out of it.

I'm reading a recent Penguin Classics edition translated by Malcolm C. Lyon, and trying not to think about what a textual nightmare this book must be. I don't want to start shopping for translations. As long as it's clear and the humour transfers, I'm happy.

The storyteller herself is such a tantalizing and romantic character that I keep wishing for a hiatus where we could see more of her immediate story. Only a minor disappointment with the 1001 Nights that the bits of framing at every chapter break are pretty much the same.

Currently reading Therese by Francois Mauriac. It's fine but mixes the traditional novel and traditional themes with a hint of modernism in a way that reads very dated today.
Also Women of Algiers In Their Apartment by Assia Djebar, which I am honestly finding pretty boring.

lol i thought frederik was xping to tom's 'short books', i was like damn son good job

i am reading… g.e. moore. sometimes, it seems worthwhile and interesting despite my belief that it cannot go anywhere. other times, i just wanna take dude aside and tell him to get real.

i spent about twenty minutes reading the principia ethica about an hour ago. i just

i've never read that, i'm reading 'main problems', where he spends 50 (100, 200) pages working up to proving that material objects exist

also that space exists

probably that existence exists

At one point I felt vaguely obligated to read Principia Ethica for the Bloomsbury connection, but for now I'm content to let Moore's books exist without my participation.

words exist, but can we use words to prove words refer to something else. seems circular to me

I can't begin to guess what is a reasonable number of pages for proving that material objects exist. You could tell me that that's a big proposition or a trivial proposition or an incoherent proposition and I'd have no idea what to say.

"Check out my hand yo", can't remember how he manages to spin that into 100 pages.

that's actually a different proof, here he's workin on 'we all see the same envelope here probably fer sure'

http://www.openculture.com/2012/02/23_free_essays_stories_by_david_foster_wallace_available_on_the_web.html

lol ows bell's fawning refs to moore were what reminded me i wanted to read him

interesting that so much of that dfw stuff is around. it's funny, it used to be the offcuttish stuff that ended up in 'flesh and not' that were the easy things to find

short stories by conrad and balzac. conrad is kind of a boss. balzac feels like reading asimov in the real world.

I hope you mean the younger better Asimov, though I haven't read any short stories by B (when did he find time)

i haven't read the novels, when does one find the time

the introduction is some bullshit. when one comes to sum up the output of h de b, "short" is not the word that comes to mind!!!! yeah thx for that, wish i'd bought the reduced goncourts collection instead

Pere Goriot, director of Huis-Clos University, , thrust out a belligerent lower lip and glared at the young sans-culotte in a hot fury.

By "he," I meant Honore, not you, thomp, so you see my paren is actually brill. Has Vautrin showed up yet? Always like him, so far.

no i got that it was a feeble attempt at witticism

Just flippant, but also had never occurred to me that he wrote short stories. Now I'm seeing very mixed comments on his plays, incl. Vautrin.

i started by following this:

http://balzacbooks.wordpress.com/suggested-reading-order-of-the-human-comedy/

which mixes everything together - 300 page books next to 18 page short stories.

David Lodge's novel about Henry James is far superior to Toibin's

― sʌxihɔːl (Ward Fowler), Tuesday, December 23, 2014 6:00 AM (Yesterday)

Has anyone read his H.G. Wells book?

Hm. When are they going to retranslate the Other Stories?

the best James in fiction is the one who pops up in Gore Vidal's Empire, intrigued by Teddy Roosevelt's noise.

Hm. Apparently he shows up in Lodge's Wells book as well.

Halfway through Armies of the Night and thank god the past 60pp have deemphasized Mailer's constant monitoring of his every fluctuation of mood and he has noticed some of what was happening outside of his woolly cow-sized head.

I finished the third volume of My Struggle. It seemed less carefully written than the others (or, for me, the writing did not magically cross time and space). I've just started The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber and am enjoying it so far.

Season's greetings, incl. "Out Demons Out!" for all yall Armies of the Night readers, and everybody else, of course.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ0RkMcPbQA

wonder what became of the footage from the bbc crew following mailer about

I finished the third volume of My Struggle.

Hitler's not a good writer imo

Rejected ILB Thread TItle: It's Springtime for Knausgard, What Are Your Reading Now?

Reposting link to Eagleton review of Lodge and Toibin books about James, along with amusing quote:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jun/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview27

Though he is impressively candid about his rancorous feelings about The Master, a book he still can't bring himself to read, the whole coincidence, minor enough in itself, begins to sound as momentous as Joyce and Lenin landing up in Zurich at the same time. He couldn't have been more agitated if he'd learnt that Tóibín had nicked his credit cards or was impersonating him every night in the Groucho Club.

Hahah!

C. Vann Woodward - The Strange Career of Jim Crow
Pushkin - The Captain's Daughter
Elizabeth Drew - Whatever It Takes

Origins of The New South: more CVW enlightenment re my neck of the woods

And what came back out of it

Started Argonauts of the Western Pacific. I also found an interesting book of Malinowski's photography in this period, which I'm gonna read concurrently.

T.H. White, The Sword in the Stone - Absolutely loving this, savoring a chapter every few days. T.H. White just seems like he would have been the coolest grandpa.

Jeff Vanermeer, Annihilation - Had my expectations up but the prose is often awkward and characterizations kind of laughable. Its hard to sell me on the believability of this strange "other" world when you can't establish "normal" human nature convincingly. Like the setting seems cool but the narration just keeps taking me out of it. Roadside Picnic handled this "weird zone that needs to be explored" scenario much better.
But I'll probably still buy the sequels to see how it all turns out...

I finished Armies of the Night and I am glad to say that Mailer did redeem his very wobbly start by the time the book ends.

I will remark that, although it is apparent by the end why Mailer chose to make this book is so Mailer-intensive, I would still rate this book as highly flawed. The meat of the book is contained in maybe 40 of the 300 pages and he only pulls this mess together loosely, by virtue of some low-grade intellectual tap dancing. Still, it was worth reading all 300 to get at those 40 and the book is a valuable period piece.

The third volume explains why twee love is best: that is when boys and girls are more or less equal and can still get along doing things like skipping rope or playing long lost wanderer returns to island home. After that, they grow apart and perhaps are not reunited until old age. This assumes best means compatible and sympathetic, but if you want tension, look to middle age.

I have now started Speedboat. I started State of Grace last year but did not finish. I read Dept. of Speculation last year and gave it to my sister.

The timing of the end of the Book of Strange New Things was perfect -- before the descent, in time to see the Manhattan skyline.

It definitely seems like it's time to spawn the next WAYR thread, now that January is here. I'll see what I can do about a clever title, but I am not feeling particularly clever atm.

To quote a famous rabbi: "It is done."