Mulling isn't just for cider: What are you reading at the dawn of 2015?

The prior WAYR thread needs to be put to bed. I offer you this slightly dull-colored replacement as the repository for the next three months of ILB critical profundity, wit and gleeful repartee.

At present I am between books, but by later this evening I hope to have my attention focused on a remedy for that. I will keep ILB informed as more details become available. In the meantime, play up! play up! and play the game!

Now taking a walk with The Brothers Karamazov. I may be gone some time.

Finished The Bone Clocks yesterday, reading Inimitable Jeeves now, (Alfred alert!), Pietr the Latvian in the queue, and Ancillary Justice on deck.

completed an early wilkie collins novel i put down a few months ago out of boredom, now onto maigret and the enigmatic lett (a.k.a. pietr the latvian^). hoping to find the six or so missing pages that have become detached before i get to the end :-/

that collins novel (basil: a story of modern life) did become much more interesting once the villain entered the story. seemed to be more or less an expression of the hero's repressed dark side returned and amplified (all very victorian), and the scene where he gets his "just desserts" by being sucked into a chasm on the cornish coast was nicely done... though basil himself remained a tiresome, sanctimonious prig right to the end.

I am reading my first novel in French! though it is a Harlequin romance translated from English, because it was the most interesting looking book in the apartment in which we found ourselves unwittingly spending a few nights. plus La fleur de la honte at least sounds more worthwhile than Forbidden Fruit.

I think after this I will try to read a more substantive novel in French. open to ideas of what if any contemporary French fiction might be compelling (obv I could read something classique but that sounds like more work than I want or am able to give right now)

How contemporary do you need? Is mid-twentieth century good enough?

yes that would be great! probably I should just read Céline but I am open to anything.

I'm a bit reluctant to ask people here what to read because their tastes seem to run toward classics and american books more than I'd like. I'm not much for police procedurals either which are a big deal here as well. I kinda like...deranged stories. could read The Kindly Ones in the original I suppose.

Things I liked and didn't find overwhelmingly difficult:
Raymond Queneau, esp Zazie dans le metro
Marguerite Duras, esp L'Amant
Nathalie Sarraute, Enfance

Just realized that I had first read the lattter in English, though. Question: what dictionary do you have?

I use the TLFi on the net (on lexilogos).

though I've been reading this Harlequin romance without a dictionary, just figuring out words I don't know from context.

Get yourself Le Robert micro if you van. I finally wore out my first copy and had to get another one in Montreal a few years ago.

so you've learned the french for 'manhood'!!!

pénis turgescent has been a fav

we have Le Robert collège for les enfants, since they need it for school

I blew through Greg Sestero's The Disaster Artist in a few days. I'm trying for the common new year's resolution of reading 50 books this year. Last year's resolution of reading more non-fiction was a total flop -- I read very few books last year.

David Leavitt's The Man Who Knew Too Much, Turing bio that focuses more on his written work than on his life - Bletchley gets a few dozen pages, his relationship with the woman that was the core of the Kiera Knightley film a scanty paragraph. That's fine with me, although I fancy reading a book just about Bletchley.

(Rereading) Lampedusa's The Leopard. Not short on sly lols despite its melancholic core: "In reality the Princess too had been subject to Tancredi’s charm, she still loved him; but the pleasures of shouting 'It’s your fault' being the strongest any human being can enjoy, all truth and feelings were swept along in its wake."

I started 'The Affirmation' by Christopher Priest the other day and so far I'm hooked.

I read some French on Kindle (or rather the iPad app) - if you add the French dictionary you can just poke words you don't understand and a definition pops up (in French). But I mostly read older stuff, so am not really great to recommend anything more modern. Houellebecq maybe? I remember Plateforme not being too hard when I read it a while ago.

xpost speaking of Turing and Bletchley, in case you didn't see it, ledge, there's good reading in this link I posted on the Winter 2014 thread:
Really enjoyed this, esp. after recently reading James Wood and others on the Penelope Fitzgerald bio and skimming her own bio of her father and uncles, didn't get that one of them worked with (and tried to supervise/aid) Turing. This gets to T.'s literary inspirations (talk about quality over quantity)
http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2014/12/18/inigo-thomas/unreliable-people/

― dow, Thursday, 18 December 2014 23:56 (2 weeks ago) Permalink

As the author says, the real-life material was so rich, don't get why the moviemakers had to fuck with it.

― dow, Thursday, 18 December 2014 23:58 (2 weeks ago) Permalink

the spy who came in from the cold. pumped for it

Chandler, The Long Goodbye

The past coupe of evenings I've been reading in the second volume of Shelby Foote's Civil War history. His homerism for the confederacy is getting more irksome, and many of his stylistic tropes are getting worn out, but I am interested in the events of that war, and I own all three volumes of Foote, so his is the version of history I shall be reading.

150 pp. into Perec's Life: A User's Manual (which could just as easily have been called An Attempt At Exhausting A Place Between The Reader's Ears, given how often I find myself flipping back through what I've read to remind myself whose estranged daughter resurfaced in the 1950s, or where I saw the cheese box with the four monks on its label depicted sitting around a table enjoying the same cheese that they appear on...)

I've been reading Merritt Tierce's Love Me Back, which is sharply written and unsentimental; its episodic, meandering plotting can be frustrating (I often feel bored with the form of the post-MFA "novel in stories") but it also seems appropriate in suggesting the narrowness and repetition of the protagonist's experience. It's also acute in dealing with the gender dynamics of service labor (I'm surprised more hasn't been written about waiting tables). I also finished Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky, which is impressive for the impassiveness of its prose and its ambition to (impossibly) render dying consciousness. There's a sadism in the coda's treatment of the wife, Kit, that I found unsettling (while Kit's depersonalization resembles that of the abductee in "A Distant Episode", here Bowles seemed on a first reading to be working dangerously closely to the topos of the maddened woman seized with obsessive desire for her rapist), although maybe it works as a way of figuring Kit's shock. I'm moving on to Bowles's Let it Come Down, which I'm enjoying for the vivid disorder of its version of Tangiers despite finding the protagonist a boring cipher so far, and also, out of a fondness of fragmentary forms of writing, starting to read George Oppen's daybooks and Daniil Kharms's bizarrely slapstick impossible anecdotes or prose poems in Today I Wrote Nothing.

I blew through Greg Sestero's The Disaster Artist in a few days.

How was it? I want to read it at some point.

Think I would have found the treatment of Kit off-putting even if I weren't a Jane Bowles fan, but it didn't help. Will get back to it some day (or not).

Can anyone recommend a Georges Simenon book?

xpost speaking of Turing and Bletchley, in case you didn't see it, ledge, there's good reading in this link I posted on the Winter 2014 thread:

Cheers, yeah I vaguely knew the film's portrayal of Turing as a lone maverick single-handedly inventing his machine against stiff opposition was basically bullshit. Infuriating really, and bizarre how it was so well reviewed.

finished Jim Crace's HARVEST - which I found tremendous. (Curiously close in a way to THE GIFT OF STONES, as discussed with Fizzles, but better and more appealing.)

read a bit more of THE TASK OF THE CRITIC.

Next going to turn to SF, certainly including FARENHEIT 451.

frank harris

The Sheltering Sky, which is impressive for the impassiveness of its prose and its ambition to (impossibly) render dying consciousness

I can't vouch for its accuracy, but the last chapter of The Leopard seems awfully good at this.

Can anyone recommend a Georges Simenon book?

Maigret - 'My Friend Maigret' (the mystery isn't terribly complex, but it has impeccable great atmosphere and 'local colour' - it's often singled out as the best in the series)
Non-Maigret - 'The Man Who Watched Trains Go By' (a terrific, utterly unpredictable romp with a wonderfully unhinged lead character) - http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/the-man-who-watched-trains-go-by/

late to Michael Lewis' "The Big Short," alongside Giovanni Arrighi's "The Long Twentieth Century." didn't do this intentionally, but they are a fascinating pair to read together.

further thoughts on Perec: the bit about the contents of the different tenants' cellars, the description of an apartment where a party had just taken place, and plenty of other places throughout the book are littered with these... lists of things. I don't know what else to call 'em

and a lot of the lists make for really fun reading
(cf the ones mentioned above)

but then every once in a while there crops up within the book's strange arbitrary sequence of plot-not-plot, depending on the context, or the reader's mood, a list that seems interminable & unfun
(this was the list of wines from Famous Houses with Capital Letters, for me)
which of course you can easily skim thru or skip

so to repeat what I just said: for the most part, the lists are really wonderful
even the long lists of just nothing but proper nouns
(cf places Johnny Cash has been)
these lists can be really overwhelmingly evocative, if you get sucked into them
but if not they just sorta lie there on the page

there are echoes of, and callbacks to, all Perec's earlier work (at least the ones that I've read); + is it just me or does his whole super-dry objective descriptions steeze owe a lot to Robbe-Grillet's?

Judith Merril, 'Stormy Weather'.

places Johnny Cash has been

the way I heard it, that guy's been everywhere, man

Yay lists. Could we also have more email, texts, ads, spam, cold calls, malware mutations, intriguingly coded phone bills in our fiction? Pleeeze

O and death threats? Cause I like me some existential thrillers, oo oui.

I'm on book two of The Once and Future King. It's less funny and more direct than the first book, which tended to address topics like war allegorically through the various animal transformations. In this one war is the main theme, which I'm thinking has obvious reference to the publication date. The unicorn chapter is really dark.

donal ryan, "the thing about december"

I got Bryan Stevenson's Just Mercy for Christmas, and finished it in about a week, which is fast for me. It seems like it was very smartly edited - the attempt to prove McMillian innocence with its detective-story pacing pulls the reader through the alternating chapters that step back for the bigger picture of dysfunctional American justice.

Staring into an abyss and going straight into it (although its they that do the latter for me):

Elsa Morante - Arturo's Island
Jean Rhys - Good Morning, Midnight

In the Morante the story feels utterly bizarre - despite having an actual penitentiary inside the island, it feels like a hell. Another of its circles is life in itself - for the fourteen year old male protagonist also feels trapped by the situation he finds himself in the sexual loves for his stepmother and then **spoiler** which you will have to read (and the wiki doesn't properly explain it). It feels far more brutal and ambitious than her later History where the big themes are attached to a big canvas that in retrospect feel off to me, and the ending is horrifying and yet these things happen. In this there is a death, although there isn't one, and it feels charged and powerful. Similarly in the Rhys we have someone who is blankly living (after the utter horror of her past) - but at least its main narrator has reached drinking age, and the false comforts a stiff drink provides are many. Was the affirmative ending a play on Joyce? I assume so.

Elsewhere I am still finishing the volume of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and finding v little to chase up apart from Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal and especially Yury Buida, who wrote a remarkable three pages on love - where loss follows closely behind. Unlike the volume of German stories the best ones in here are in the 19th century: Pushkin, Gogol, Leskov, Chehkov. Shamolov, Platonov for the 20th but I knew of those already. The Gogol was an excellent re-discovery for me and ought to try and read more of his stories. I am not sure why Lermontov was re-published as it is already in Hero of our Time. Dostoevsky was useful for me as I hadn't read any of his shorter work. I've read Krzhizhanowsky's Quadraturin and sorry I am not feeling. Babel and Kharms aims for effects that don't come off. Its hilarious that Bunin won a Nobel with such pretty nothings. Bulgakov and Solzhenistsyn will always be boring as hell to me.

I've seen Morante compared to Ferrante, so will have to read her. Barely recovered from My Brilliant Friend before taking off onThe Brothers of Karamazov Express--nearing home stretch, and wondering what Dusty Dusty novel I should read after this (and Crime and Punishment)? The Idiot was my delight.

Kick-starting the year with John Fowles' The Magus, which is proving to be very emotionally rewarding so far. I always forget how psychoanalytically engaged Fowles is and how that is embedded into his novels with these concurrent invisible narratives that dwell beneath everything and begin to surface the further you fall. And if an author can make me cry hopelessly within the first 40 pages then something special is happening.

dow - How is your progress through The Brothers Karamazov? Would love to hear what you make of The Grand Inquisitor and The Devil.

Nick Kotz - Judgment Days
Kingsley Amis - One Fat Englishman
E.M. Forster - A Room with a View (reread)

Wil have to get back to you on that, but so far the GI seems like an ancestor of O'Brien in Orwell's 1984, also Ivan's framework of parody makes it seem proto-mmodern

I really did have to get back to you on that, was being strongly urged out the door---still do, but also note that the grain of plausible grievance in the Grand Inquistor's indictment of his Prisoner is what makes it so dangerous, of course.
Also, I did intuit the likely perimeters of the whodunnit, as sketched and implied, then was distracted by the magician author, until I'm prompted to realize, "Oh yeah, I knew that!" Just as a character throws the other one's (resisted)gut glint back at him, wrapped in guilt, when pressed and pressed and pressed again...

Bob Stanley's Yeah Yeah Yeah which I got the new edition for my birthday. I'm finding it pretty readable if heavily opinionated to points of contention in places. I've come across a number of inaccuracies. But it is an interesting read at least. Wonder if everybody is reading it cover to cover. & how many are taking it as gospel?

Sonic Boom by Peter Blecha. A history of r'n'b/rock&roll/rock in the Northwest U.S. Very interesting. Covers the popularisation of Louie Louie; the history of The Wailers, Paul Revere & the Raiders, Sonics etc; acid rock/FM radio; 70s &goes on to some stuff on grunge. Great find in that shop at the end of the alley from Berwick st in Soho. I think that place is a gay/sex bookshop but it also tends to have somewhat random discount rock books so is worth a peruse.
Been reading that on buses so taking longer than it might otherwise.

Still got about 100pp of the last Thomas Covenant book in the 1st trilogy omnibus to finish. That's my loo book which is why it's taking time.

Read the Robert Wyatt bio Different Every Time over Xmas. Really enjoyed. Makes me want to check out what I'm not familiar with, mainly his later solo work. I need to pick up the companion compilation 2cd.

What is an example of inaccuracy in the Bob Stanley book?

I looked at it and maybe was surprised at how straightforward / chronological it appeared to be.

hey ows, if i wanted a quick course in what benjamin thought about modernism (pref. literary, but any), is there any way to cut to the core (given the way he worked)?

i was thinking of going through one of those brecht collections, and the baudelaire collection (which sticks early stuff together with parts/outtakes from the arcades proj). annoyingly i have not really read any brecht or baudelaire, but what are ya gonna do.

You could read some Brecht or Baudelaire?

There is no decent collection of Walter B's lit crit is there, other than a few essays in Illuminations.

Love The Motion of Light and Water, although there is a tinge of sadness that I like it more than much of Delaney's actual fiction.

Ingeborg Bachmann's short stories in The Thirtieth Year, which anticipate the ferocity of Malina and Bernhard's fiction in their sense of the violent incommensurability of utopian longings with actually existing relationships.

My library doesn't have a copy :-(

fair amount of literary criticism in the first belknap volume of his selected writings, from memory. need to read his essay on surrealism.

xyzzz there's a slim volume of Ingeborg Bachmann short stories in an Oxfam near my work, if you want me to grab it for you (assuming it's still there tomorrow). It looked good, I would have bought it but I am finding myself never getting round to reading short stories.

If you could try Tim that would be great!

xxxp there are now plenty of collections, and also i have all of the belknap volumes, it's just that there's a lot to sort through

hey ows, if i wanted a quick course in what benjamin thought about modernism (pref. literary, but any), is there any way to cut to the core (given the way he worked)?

i was thinking of going through one of those brecht collections, and the baudelaire collection (which sticks early stuff together with parts/outtakes from the arcades proj). annoyingly i have not really read any brecht or baudelaire, but what are ya gonna do.

Great question, j.! Benjamin's engagement with modernism is so extensive that it's difficult to narrow it down to a few representative texts, but the Baudelaire collection would indeed be the best place to start. Its central essays represent a very late crystallization of Benjamin's broader thought about capitalist modernity in The Arcades Project, even if it only represents one way among many possible others of fitting that vast collection of fragments together. After you've gone through the Baudelaire and Brecht collections (the most relevant essays in the latter are probably "The Author as Producer" and "What is Epic Theatre?"), you could supplement those texts with "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility" (which is not really focused on literature, and which I'm almost certain you've already read, but it's nonetheless crucial to Benjamin's thinking about aesthetics and modernity), "Surrealism", "Crisis of the Novel" (on Döblin and Berlin Alexanderplatz), "Franz Kafka", "On the Image of Proust", and "The Storyteller" (which is in part an implicit response to Lukács's Theory of the Novel, iirc). You shouldn't need to have read much Baudelaire or Brecht to follow the thread of Benjamin's analysis, although it's obviously always worth reading them on their own.

thanks, ows. i've read many of these over the years, it's just piecing it together that has recently become more needful. 'crisis' should be good, i had recently had an independent hankering to fit döblin into my crazy schemes somehow.

Getting into the first Game Of Thrones book.
Also got a cop memoir called Blue Blood as my toilet book which seems pretty interesting.

& Cloud Atlas for reading on transport and wherever. Am enjoying bits of this.

Robert Lapsey - Introducing Film Theory
Alan Partridge - We Need To Talk About Alan (on audiobook while walking)
JM Coetzee - Disgrace

Coetzee is a huge tool. I was a student in a workshop he ran ca. '99. I was a typical undergraduate, eager and undisciplined, and full of better ideas than writing chops. As part of the program, I brought him a manuscript I'd prepared. Even though I'd worked hard for the honor/privilege of his eyes, JMC refused to look at it beyond the first sentence. He pulled out some lame-o Jedi teacher 'this is too long, bring it to me when it's half the length' bologna. But I didn't know better. I worked like a dog for a few days to cut it down by like 60%, at which point I gave it to Coetzee who read the reworked first page and ––actually –– scoffed. 'Too short,' he said, 'bring this back to me when you've expanded by, even, two or three times its current length.'

hahahaha

You can call your memoir Disgrace too!

Did he ever end up reading it?

i had a teacher who did that with me, not in the same way. 'let's just talk about the first paragraph…'. it was actually effective, if frustrating.

A savvy professor took pity on me and clued me in to JMC's bogosity. I never showed him anything. Funny story, though, that the next writer-in-residence was given my manuscript, professed to LOVE IT, and offered to help me edit it for submission to some magazines in which he had hooks. I was done being burned, and I turned him down. I figured he'd been asked to puff me up by the professors who knew I'd been burned by JMC. I didn't want to get played again. Something like eight years later I was working in the Borders in downtown Seattle when this second, friendly, author came in to sign copies of his newest title. He saw me, recognized me, and remembered basically the entire story I'd written, and told me (again) how much he loved it.

screw you, pompous nobel prize winner

Hassan Blasim: The Iraqi Christ - this was published with another book in the US as 'The Corpse Exhibition'. Very visceral stuff, full of suicide bombings and murders and knifings and rape. Not sure if it's actually GOOD, but it's certainly vivid.

Hey xyzz, here's what you scored today: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0841910715

Drop me a line, let me know when we can catch up to hand it over (I might try to make it to the FAP later in the month; if that's the right choice it might have to be a flying FAP visit on my part.

Alan Partridge - We Need To Talk About Alan (on audiobook while walking)

this is partridge's best work. absolutely hilarious.

Thanks Tim!! I'll drop you a text later in the week, think I can drop into Hangover L this Sunday. Otherwise the FAP is scheduled for the 26th.

(We go from 5-9 on a Sunday these days, just in case you didn't know.)

(I didn't, thanks.)

Alan Partridge - We Need To Talk About Alan (on audiobook while walking)

this is partridge's best work. absolutely hilarious.

I'm guessing the audiobook version is the preferred version?

Yep. I can't praise it enough - worth about four consecutive listens at the start.

ah yeah this was made for audiobook really

litbore in pub came up to me and came up with the an all-time acme litbore exchange:

"I personally find Dombey and Son a very difficult book"
"Why?"
"That's a very good question without you knowing why."

10/10 for bore technique there.

the an bore.

I recently finished a book of essays by David Quammen, Natural Acts. They were all originally magazine pieces, but somewhat above average for style and content. This was the 'expanded and revised' edition of 2008.

I then picked up volume one of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard and I'm about 90pp into it. I can't say it has hooked me. It is a contrast to the Patti Smith memoir, Just Kids, that I recently read, in that instead of being classified as non-fiction while taking a mythologizing approach, My Struggle is classified as a novel, but pushes its stories forward by sweeping together the sorts of humdrum details one could almost call life's dust.

Although it is clearly starting out as an autobiographical bildungsroman, filled with family and friends from the author's young life, I notice a glaring lack of empathy for any of the characters described in it. Knausgaard doesn't endow a single one of them with a trace of inner life or even show curiosity about what his characters might think or feel. Even his descriptions of his own thoughts and feelings are cursory and mainly concern his immediate goals and barest motives. I find the result sterile and rather barren, as if he were trying to follow Beckett's lead without grasping any of Beckett's subtlety.

I may not finish this, especially since he continues to pile on further volumes I might feel it necessary to read if I get through this one.

Finished Victor Serge's Midnight in the Century which -- given the chronology -- is where he actually pares down all the experimental fiction he has been reading and is about to embark in the greatest writing of his life, to be found in The Unforgiving years and Comrade Tulayev, as the purges become inescapable, and Serge's fiction could not be an escape ("Writer as witness", as Richard Greenman put it in his intro). Serge is so good at marshaling together quotidian detail of Soviet life, he is so alert - which works for any novelist of course, but also has implications for that Bolshevik project of proletarian fiction. Here his writing is taking a turn towards something more lyrical, and at times strangely Platonov-like with lines such as:

Men existed here in sharp relief, the accumulated hours crushed them, but time per se did not exist

or later with this:

Life was passing out of them, visibly, in bloody stools, all day, all night

Further on the historical front I've also finished Yourcenar's Memories of Hadrian. Reading the novel cold, without any knowledge of the historical Hadrian I liked how he was cast as this liberal in his interior life who could be a brutal, calculating tyrant when he needed to (typical liberal huh?) My edition had reflections on the composition of the book, and that is really worth a read. On one page Yourcenar talks about her novel as not about time, but space:

time itself has nothing to do with the matter. It is always surprising that my contemporaries, masters as they consider themselves to be over space, apparently remain unaware that one can contract the distance between spaces at will

I chose to abandon My Struggle. It was not right for me.

I just read Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather. It was an unabashed romance, but unlike most modern romances it was celibate. I would call it an updated take on the medieval genre of hagiography, but using all the naturalistic conventions of the novel. Taken on these terms, it was a pleasant book, incorporating a very sweet and pure vision of humanity, based strongly in the catholic tradition of worship of the Virgin Mary.

Cather should be imitated and discussed like Hemingway is. She's the best American novelist of that era.

Started and finished a bunch of books this week:

Julian E. Zelizer - The Fierce Urgency of Now
Mario Vargas Llosa - The Discreet Hero
Marilynne Robinson - The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

i got to the part in 'of experience' where montaigne details life with his kidney stones AT LENGTH. so i have been reading that, and i am still reading that.

and still sloterdijk.

which one?

same, critique of cynical reason (it's long!)

ah i thought maybe you were tackling the "Bubbles" thing...i haven't really seen much/any talk about that.

yeesh that's > 600 pages too

better get on it!

Mulling can't last much longer; flights of fancy must be coming soon: good time to post.

Past reading: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber (Whiteflower must be cauliflower; I think I read that it can be used to make pizza crust; and there is an Indian dish with potato served at the Indian Oven in Columbus, OH.)
Current reading: Satin Island by Tom McCarthy (Euro accents -- contemporary!)
Interim reading (Please do not judge ... the combined influence of the NYT Book Review and my lending library's approval plan and ILX reading lists!): Hall of Small Mammals by Thomas Pierce; Single, Carefree, Mellow by Katherine Heiny; The Vegetarian by Han Kang
Future reading (books on coffee table (borrowed) for now; books on shelves (bought) not included): The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt; C by Tom McCarthy

Mario Vargas Llosa - Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
James Harvey - Watching Them Be: Star Presence on the Screen From Garbo to Balthazar

just started Andew Scull's "Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of Insanity, from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine"

Interim reading (addendum): (you were wrong) by Matthew Sharpe

die fröhliche wissenschaft

Been reading "Albion's Seed" by David Hackett Fischer. Pre-Revolutionary War US history is something I haven't read much of before, and this book makes it pretty interesting, despite being fairly systematic and academic in its approach.

Mulling can't last much longer; flights of fancy must be coming soon

Obviously youn is not an ambitious, go-getter and self-starter type of poster!

I'm almost finished George Saunders' Tenth of December which is so fucking good. Read slowly over a couple of months because it was hitting so close to home, I had to keep stopping to give myself a break. I've never read Saunders before and some of these stories are totally devastating.

I'm glad to hear that Coetzee is a huge tool.

Righteous Dopefiend, by Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg, about a community of heroin users living under a freeway interchange in San Francisco. It's bleak but immensely engaging. Schonberg's photography is really excellent.

I have just inaugurated a new WAYR thread for springtime 2015. I opened all the windows and it is well-aired and ready for customers.