Spring and All 2k16 / what are you reading now?

I remember a rather good sitcom about a psychotic book group from the 1990s with two swedes reading 'hunger'. "Why doesnt he just go and get some food? Stupid Norwegian!"

The Book Group with Michelle Gomez and a few others who've turned up elsewhere since? The Swedes were footballers wives I think.

I did not mind SPQR, even if it came off like a Clive James voice over for a Roman history doc.

I've continued to read SPQR. It is a competent summary/overview, but I had hoped that she'd be weaving more information into the narrative that was sourced from archeology and inscriptions, rather than surviving texts, bcz I've read about 85% of those texts and her analysis is along very conventional lines, and so it's not really challenging or enlarging any of Roman history as I already viewed it.

I read it as popular history

Seems like the most accurate way to categorize it.

The Book Group, that's the one. I should have remembered the the title, really. guid on ye, big man.

Catherine Parr Traill, The Backwoods of Canada
L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (re-read)
Alice Munro, Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

Just started reading Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper and it is fucking incredible!! It is absolutely crazy and savagely funny. 25 pages in and easily the best thing I've read for the last couple of years.

oliver Harris: The House of Fame -- third of his books about Nick Belsey, a catastrophically self-destructive and corrupt London detective who has excellent detective skills/instincts but no self-control and a bemused, sardonic stance as he watches himself stumble into other people's disasters. He starts the book squatting in the abandoned Hampstead police station while waiting to be arrested for corruption, and things deteriorate from there. Very recommended.

Charlotte Wood: The Natural Way of Things -- deeply unpleasant but well-written novel about misogyny and corporations profiting from human misery, which is currently winning all the awards in Australia

Adolfo Bioy Casares - Asleep in the Sun has the absurdist plot of a man married to a dog (assume his wife was taken over, not that it matters too much). By turns, a spin on unconditional love, bureaucratic (perhaps evil) institutions (the asylum the bitch is confined to) and also - even more so - how people might substitute the need of love for another human being for the love of a pet - all felt underdeveloped. Moravia's Agostino was a masterful novella, especially in its initial scenes of a highly charged eroticism between mother (widowed, beautiful) and a teenage son. Could be read alongside some Musil and Mishima.

Rilke's letters. The Norton volume covers much of his correspondence from 1910 to his death. The lonely, highly literary hobo might appear unattractive but the girls were digging it.

A friend reports:
I'm finishing The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life by Ryszard Kapuscinski, which is one fantastic book: a collection of his shorter pieces from all over sub-Saharan Africa. Among other things it contains the most lucid account of the factors behind the Rwandan genocide, as well as a few of the other neverending armed conflicts on the continent. Extremely highly recommended. Not my usual, but intriguing.

Last night I read the Prologue to Confessio Amantis, John Gower in the verse modernization by Terence Tiller (Penguin Classics). Not sure how far I'll go on with it.

Robertson Davies, The Fifth Business (excellent)
A bunch of Canadian poetry

Now reading The Third Reich, which, if I read the intro correctly, was Roberto Bolano's first novel. He has a keen sense of characterization.

I think Antwerp and Monsieur Pain were written earlier, but I like the slowly-mounting atmosphere of dread throughout The Third Reich, even if it feels sketchier than most of Bolaño's 90s novels.

Edna O'Brien - In the Forest
* Marianne Moore - Selected Poems

the fall of kelvin walker: a fable of the sixties by alasdair gray

Love Comes To Buildings On Fire book on 5 years of music in NYC in the 70s. I'm on 75 so far. Pretty good so far.

The Chill by Ross Macdonald >
A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor >
Bill The Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison

the chill is the best macdonald imo. i read it and cry of the owl by patricia highsmith back to back and they're always closely associated in my mind (both from 1962 iirc).

Funnily enough, there's a hard boiled crime thread somewhere on here, where James Redd (under a diff user name) says much the same thing about The Chill (my copy of which cost me twenty pence in a library sale). I haven't really read enough Macdonald to attempt a ranking, but I adore his descriptions of locations and atmosphere, so a mostly fog-bound mystery definitely plays to his strengths.

There's also a funny sequence where Archer rather improbably picks up a book on philosophy to read while waiting on a witness or something, and you know it's there just cos Macdonald wanted to talk about Zeno for a bit

yeah macdonald & philosophy is like pk dick & classical music

PKD had a classical music radio program and a classical music store (worked in one, anyway) before giving it all up to write science fiction full-time (and live on speed and cat food from time to time). Yeah, he shares classical music breaks in some of his fiction like Ross MacDonald does the philosophy (ditto John D. MacDonald, eventually at much greater length).

and macdonald aka kenneth millar had a phi beta kappa phd in literature. didn't mean to suggest he and pkd were fakin' it.

hope this is not too spoilery but the thing that ties the chill and cry of the owl together most in my mind is they both have great abrupt giallo-style endings.

a PK Dick story collection, in fact

Again, spoilery - yes, The Chill definitely has a great last minute twist that casts the entire narrative in a v different light, but it's more Sleepaway Camp than Bird w/ the Crystal Plumage, imho

Think I have Cry of the Owl on a stack somewhere, will check it out thanks

xpost no, I didn't think you were suggesting that they were faking it, I just wanted to add my fyi. btw, I saw that Library of America Ross MacD. recently and wondered, nothing against him, but why not somebody who needs more exposure, like Jean Stafford (but maybe they've done a JS collection as well? Hope so)

Which reminds me: is Katherine Anne Porter good? Used to be a big name, but I never see her mentioned any more.

She's good! Start with 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider', which is a pretty good overview of her short fiction (it's a Penguin UK book), or else the massive Library of America hardcover has all her short fiction.

Though I see the sole Amazon review of Pale Horse is not impressed: "This book has lots of good reviews but I purchased it as it was recomended by John M. Barry in his book 'The Great Influenza- The story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History'. I found it very slow and of no interest to my research on the Pandemic of 1918/19 and must admit I have given up trying to read it."

Dazai's The Setting Sun has the potential to corrode your inner being - this is basically a suicide note as fiction. Very calculated and cool. I then went on to finish a few stories by Joseph Roth where all his themes of displacement due to the collapse of Austro-Hungary makes itself felt to a more or less of an extent.

I finished the Regina Ullmann story collection. I wasn't sure about the dreamlike, disconnected style at first, but I warmed to it by the end. The style seems to fit well with some of the more focused childhood reminiscences. There's a funny aside about halfway through one of these stories: "It's a strange thing about human thoughts. If I told someone this story, he would probably have trouble saying at the point what it was about, since nothing had been thought yet, nothing had been done." This goes for most of the stories in the collection, but yet somehow they mostly work.

thought id put this here for idk book ppl who wouldnt click the ile reddit thread, this serialized story being posted is neat -- info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9MOTHER9HORSE9EYES9

it was bothering me that i couldnt recall & then i did that it reminds me of this book quite a bit, or at least the writing style does def - https://www.amazon.com/Method-Actors-novel-Carl-Shuker-ebook/dp/B005JUOGOM?ie=UTF8&qid=1462844460&ref_=la_B001JP2O7M_1_1&s=books&sr=1-1

Visit to NYC bookshop specializing in French lit. Fave: the finale, staff's takes on their picks:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/may/09/interview-with-a-bookstore-albertine-a-little-paris-in-new-york?CMP=twt_books_b-gdnbooks

The Tom Roberge in that article is half of the very entertaining Three Percent Podcast, which is mostly about books translated into English, and has lots of good recommendations

Might be B.Traven's The General From The Jungle which I found for €3 yesterday.
I was surprised to see it was a translation. Hadn't realised he was a non-English speaker. Does seem to have been an interesting character. Think it may have been in John Huston's autobio that I read about him pretending to be somebody else during the research or making of Treasure of Sierra Madre. &Huston only realising it was him afterward.

I say may be cos I just finished Hunger by Knut Hamsun on the bus yesterday. I have a large number of possible alternatives.

consensus is that traven was an exiled austrian anarchist or something along those lines i think?

rereading j.p. donleavy's the ginger man

just started gary indiana - three month fever. i'm p impressed even after the acknowledgements and the opening chapter.

Which reminds me: is Katherine Anne Porter good? Used to be a big name, but I never see her mentioned any more.

― dow, Thursday, May 5, 2016 7:46 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

She's good! Start with 'Pale Horse, Pale Rider', which is a pretty good overview of her short fiction (it's a Penguin UK book), or else the massive Library of America hardcover has all her short fiction.

― 🐸a hairy howling toad torments a man whose wife is deathly ill (James Morrison)

I learned a lot from her about tonal control. You can start with Flowering Judas, but, yes, PHPR has two her best short novels.

Are you writing your own stuff, Alfred?

yeah

Ah cool. I often want to talk about fiction writing on ILX but dunno if we have enough people doing it to sustain a thread.

KAP short stories the best. you can kinda begin and end with flowering judas and pale horse which might sound mean but she did more in those books than most people ever do and she never really topped them. though the collected stories is easy enough to find and catches all the short stuff pretty much.

picked up I'm Dying Laughing: The Humourist by Christina Stead and now i'm swirling in the craziness.

OK, you guys have me intrigued. But to gauge my own likelihood of enjoying her work, would you say Porter is more Alice Munro, or Flannery O'Connor? Or something else entirely?

^^^that's one of the stead's i still need to read... went on a massive binge a decade and a half ago but not really revisited her since, though i keep picking up her books when i see them (lots of secondhand stead around here!)

would you say Porter is more Alice Munro, or Flannery O'Connor? Or something else entirely?

Something else entirely. Porter is taut; she's closer to Thomas Mann or even Tolstoy. A steely self-control. It's true that when I was in elementary and high school she was always taught and has somewhat disappeared. `