The girls are out flaunting their Summer plumage but you're stuck inside, reading. What?

James Ellroy, The Big Nowhere. Hurrah, finally one of his that doesn't instantly give me a headache.

The successor thread to Spring in the NORTH, Autumn in the SOUTH, it matters not, what are you READING?, by overwhelming popular demand.

at the moment:

John Barth, Chimera -- I sorta gave up on The Sot-Weed Factor cuz it was getting waaaaay tedious, but I found a used copy of this at a marxist book store for two bucks and couldn't resist. The first part was great, second pretty good, third seems okay so far but I'm worried diminishing returns are setting in. Still, I gotta give him credit: dude can make a mind-bending metafictional structure like nobody else.

Kierkegaard, Either/Or -- Sort of been on a K kick lately, and I figured this was a good springboard from the existential stuff (The Sickness Unto Death and Fear and Trembling are all I've read so far) into the broader range of his writings. I didn't expect him to be so (proto-)Nietzschean (NB: this is a good thing, as I find them both enormously entertaining).

Lautreamont, Les Chants du Maldoror -- Weirder than I expected. Not really sure what to think. Like, at all.

Big fan of Kiekegaard, Snowy - your post makes me want to return to him, and your 'description' of the Lautreamont has made me powerful curious.

Just finished both The Flower in Season by Jocelyn Brooke, which was a guide to wild flowers arranged seasonally. I know nothing about wild flowers (even now) but it's full of digressive excerpts from old botanical books, as well as relevant scraps of poetry and impressionistic descriptions of the months. More appealing than it might sound.

Also, unconnectedly, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald, which I'm afraid to say I never really got into. I wanted to, and I could sort of sense its skillful interweavings and depiction of a time (where I'm sure the slightest bum note would have stood out a mile), but at a distance. I found it exceptionally hard to envisage the characters.

I'm pretty certain this is my fault, and I think I was reading the wrong books around it - I'll give it another go at another time I think.

One of the books I was reading around it was Denton Welch's A Voice Through A Cloud by Denton Welch, which I mentioned on the previous thread, but will mention again, because it zoomed right into one of my favourite books of all time. Sensitive and morbid, with pre-Raphaelite obsession with detail. This comes at the expense of having a likable character - he's petulant and self-centred, but because of his dreadful predicament, this is allowable and excusable, and in no way detracts from the beauty and force of the book. I will be reading more of his stuff immediately. Anyone whose two main fans appear to be Alan Bennett and William Burroughs must have something going for him, right?

About to start Chaos and Night by Henry de Montherlant.

Denton Welch's A Voice Through A Cloud by Denton Welch

er, by Denton Welch, in case you hadn't guessed.

Struggling through Alasdair Gray's Lanark. Liked the first book, but the middle two were too grimly crushingly real, and I'm all out of steam for the last one.

http://repeatingislands.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/naipaul1.jpg

A Passage to India (stuffy old English dudes will be pleased to know that Forster's put them back in my good books after Women in Love put them in my bad books), an introduction to Alain Badiou in anticipation of his trip here next month, and Andy Hamilton's Aesthetics and Music.

Still going with Moby Dick, a few pages a day, alas. It has nothing to do with the book itself (which I'm actually savoring), but with life with a newborn, which has left me with a maximum of about 7 minutes of reading before I start to nod off.

Just returned to 2666 for the 2nd book.

Finished The Radetsky March - the best novel I've read in a few years. Never expected to shed a tear over at the demise of the Austro-Hungarian empire or the twin monarchy. I re-read "The Rotters Club" for a book group discussion without much changing my opinion of it as a very enjoyable read despite a pedestrian prose style and many other egregious flaws. Also read Daniel Jaffe's short bio of Prokofiev in the 20th Century Composers series, good and readable of its type though Jaffe's enthusiasm for Sergey Sergeyevich's music seems a bit lukewarm for a guy who chose to write a book on him - couldn't they have found a fan?

Have a bunch of books on my desk I bought at various charity shops to read the next couple weeks:
Nabokov's Lolita
Greene's The Power & The Glory
Sartre's The Age of Reason
I'm sure there is another I'm missing.

oh and that Celine Dion 33 1/3.

Re the Kierkegaard, there's a book I'll buy if I ever see it...

http://press.princeton.edu/images/k7746.gif

Supposed to be genuinely hilarious.

finished jane smiley's 10 days in the hills - really really enjoyed this, just a super long ramble about a bunch of people, but still great. i like the way she draws details.

also finished 'music for torching' and 'the mistress's daughter' by a.m. homes - really liked both, just started 'the end of alice' which is so far disappointing.

almost at the end of 'inner circle' by t.c. boyle, pretty good, nothing amazing.

Simon Reynolds Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (Anniversary Edition) - I've really enjoyed this for the most part, although it suffers the same problems as Rip It Up and Start Again in that a) it is a bunch of essays stitched together b) it kind of peters out towards the end once it gets past the big stuff like Detroit/Chicago, Acid House, Hardcore, and Jungle (big sections on gabba and American rave post-90 are a drag). With hindsight, it is pretty lol when he basically endorses Big Beat as the next great wave of rave at the end of the original edition, but he corrects himself in the final chapter of the revised edition. He is also a bit too quick to canonize the period of music that he was a direct participant in (1991-1993) and the impression is that he is basically chastizing readers who missed out on the first go round (cf. Zomby's "Where Were You in '92?"). This seems paradoxically rockist in a book that is arguing for the merits of experimentation being driven by the needs of the populist masses/dancefloor rather than auteurs. But excellent whether you are interested in the music or the social/drug aspects of the culture particularly in Britain.

David Thomson The Alien Quartet - critical essays on the Alien movies. Purchased after someone revived the Aliens thread the other day. I've only read a couple of pages so far but I like he is style. I don't generally enjoy reading academic cultural crit, but for the Aliens movies I will make an exception.

THOMSON = ACADEMIC

QUOI?????

His prose does glitter mightily, mind you, though I've soured on most of his critiques (basically spending his current days catering to nostalgiaphiles).

Writing my MA dissertation this summer, so pretty much only reading for that. So everything by Bern Porter I can lay my hands on, a bunch of shit about concrete poetry, typography, sciart, mail art, all that jazz.

Vercors: You Shall Know Them

This is some weird, fun stuff, like a French (ie a bit more sexual explicitness, more philosophising, though set in England) version of John Wyndham's more satirical stuff. The missin link species is discovered, but are they legally apes or humans? One guy has a child with one of the missing link women, and then kills the child, hoping that he will get done for murder, thus proving the new species to be human, and preventing them becoming enslaved by corporate interests.

The Alienist and Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End.

i started reading parade's end and then misplaced my copy! so aggravating. by the time i found it again i was reading something else. but i will get back to it. i rilly rilly liked what i read of it. which was, like, most of the first book.

you want a daunting list? here are the "selected" works of ford madox ford:

The Shifting of the Fire, as H Ford Hueffer, Unwin, 1892.
The Brown Owl, as H Ford Hueffer, Unwin, 1892.
The Queen Who Flew: A Fairy Tale, Bliss Sands & Foster, 1894
The Cinque Ports, Blackwood, 1900.
The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story, Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer, Heinemann, 1901.
Rossetti, Duckworth, [1902].
Romance, Joseph Conrad and Ford M. Hueffer, Smith Elder, 1903.
The Benefactor, Langham, 1905.
The Soul of London, Alston, 1905.
The Heart of the Country, Duckworth, 1906.
The Fifth Queen, Alston, 1906.
Privy Seal, Alston, 1907.
An English Girl, Methuen, 1907.
The Fifth Queen Crowned, Nash, 1908.
Mr Apollo, Methuen, 1908.
The Half Moon, Nash, 1909.
A Call, Chatto, 1910.
The Portrait, Methuen, 1910.
The Critical Attitude, as Ford Madox Hueffer, Duckworth 1911 (extensively revised in 1935).
The Simple Life Limited, as Daniel Chaucer, Lane, 1911.
Ladies Whose Bright Eyes, Constable, 1911 (extensively revised in 1935).
The Panel, Constable, 1912.
The New Humpty Dumpty, as Daniel Chaucer, Lane, 1912.
Henry James, Secker, 1913.
Mr Fleight, Latimer, 1913.
The Young Lovell, Chatto, 1913.
Between St Dennis and St George, Hodder, 1915.
The Good Soldier, Lane, 1915.
Zeppelin Nights, with Violet Hunt, Lane, 1915.
The Marsden Case, Duckworth, 1923.
Women and Men, Paris, 1923.
Mr Bosphorous, Duckworth, 1923.
The Nature of a Crime, with Joseph Conrad, Duckworth, 1924.
Some Do Not..., Duckworth, 1924.
No More Parades, Duckworth, 1925.
A Man Could Stand Up, Duckworth, 1926.
New York is Not America, Duckworth, 1927.
New York Essays, Rudge, 1927.
New Poems, Rudge, 1927.
Last Post, Duckworth, 1928.
A Little Less Than Gods, Duckworth, [1928].
No Enemy, Macaulay, 1929.
The English Novel, Constable, 1930.
When the Wicked Man, Cape, 1932.
The Rash Act, Cape, 1933.
It Was the Nightingale, Lippincott, 1933.
Henry for Hugh, Lippincott, 1934.
Provence, Unwin, 1935.
Ladies Whose Bright Eyes(revised version), 1935
Great Trade Route, OUP, 1937.
Vive Le Roy, Unwin, 1937.
The March of Literature, Dial, 1938.
Selected Poems, Randall, 1971.
Your Mirror to My Times, Holt, 1971.

Blimey!

The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story, is about invaders from a parallel universe coming to our world.

A significant chunk of Coetzee's 'Youth' is about a the main character doing his PhD(?) on Ford, and discovering that pretty much everything outside of Parade's End, The Good Soldier and The Fifth Queen is tedious and unreadable.

i remember once looking e.f. benson up online and seeing his bibliography and thinking: hmm, i've read 5 or 6 of these, only 70 more to go!

i am trading some books in this weekend, cuz i want a copy of the book they have at the nice indie book shop in my 'hood about the AACM. They also have a book abt Juju music that i am gonna get for ilx user "69"

Fucking Vercors. It was the nineties and I was a new student arrival in France, taking among other things a class on the Code Civil. It's quite difficult, what with the language, the alien subject and the bizarrely rote-learning approach that characterises the lower years of undergraduate life there. But I'm trying my best, and sit in the very front row of each class, pen working furiously, hoping to note enough to know where the gaps might be so that I can fill them in in my own time.

Code Civil comes around, but rather than talking about the Code, the teacher instead spends the first four lectures (two hours each!) reading excerpts from Les Animaux Dénaturés and then giving us his musings thereon, following such tangents as pleased him. All the while sitting behind his lectern, head cocked heavenwards as if struck by divine inspiration, sometimes playing with his horrible long hair.

Few things in my life have ever been so disheartening as those lectures - not only were they impossible to make sense of, but even where I could understand the words they meant absolutely nothing to me. And then at the end of the eighth hour, he revealed that the book did not in fact bear upon the subject at all, but 'I speak of this merely because it is a matter which interests me'. The actual class would commence in week five.

The worst part was that he didn't change his manner, and continued to teach the Code as if it were a philosophical tract, which it is not. Come the oral exam, instead of simply answering the questions as dully as possible (with hindsight clearly the correct approach) I attempted to answer as the class had been taught. It was a fiasco as I still didn't have the language for it and he wasn't interested in engaging, instead reverting to his incomprehensible monologues. Come the end, the final humiliation - he paused for a long time, looked at me and said in baby words: "Votre français n'est pas bon", wrote my mark on the sheet and looked away. It was a bare pass. The test had gone so badly that I was effusively and pathetically grateful. I wish I'd punched him in the face.

Professor Roy, if you're reading this: I didn't think you were a wise man or a great intellectual, I thought you were a pompous wanker. I was only pretending.

'I speak of this merely because it is a matter which interests me'

I laughed a lot.

That Thomson book on the Alien films is nuts - will be interested to hear what you make of it. Trotting along stylishly and then (SPOILERS) off we go into the world of Weaver menses fanfic.

Finished Doctor Faustus. My that's a serious novel. I liked it a lot. Also read Mann's short book on the composition of Faustus, which was nice both as part-portrait of that Pacific Weimar scene and account of how 600pp novel of ideas gets written. Am now continuing on a Mann kick: The Holy Sinner, but thinking about a re-read of The Magic Mountain. But The Man Without Qualities is tempting.

In any case, sticking with dense mid-century central Europe. I feel like I'm only really up for this stuff once every 2-3 years, and should exploit any roll I get on.

Ryunosuke Akutagawa's Rashomon And Seventeen Other Stories

Just read Maclaren Ross's "Of Love and Hunger", prompted by his proselytisers on ILM. A fine novel that made me think of Richard Yates as well as the more obvious Patrick Hamilton. It's not quite as fine as the very best work of those writers but it's close enough and different enough that I'm very pleased to have been made aware of it.

I'm about to read Ruiz Zafon's "The Shadow of The Wind". The first few pages are not encouraging.

Just finished The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It's wonderful.

Just started The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier. I get overly excited about most books, I'm an easy target, and not much of a critic, but I'm abnormally giddy about Carpentier.

Didn't know of Mann's composition bk -- sounds like a good one to track down.

In the last week or so I've some Djuna Barnes (after the hate she got on ILE), finishing Patricia Highsmith's Carol, and looking over a few essays by Milan Kundera (he loves that Central European Canon)

Frederic Spotts - 'The Shameful Peace - How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation'

'In Youth Is Pleasure' = Denton Welch

Less pleasing than A Voice Through a Cloud but the semi post aesthete attitude to detail, with barely subdued homoeroticism. Very skilful writing.

Less pleasing than A Voice Through a Cloud but the semi post aesthete attitude to detail, with barely subdued homoeroticism.

Good that i can still construct a sentence after a few beers.

Mishna Wolff: I'm Down

Memoir of a girl whose completely white father was convinced he was a funky black man, and who tried his utmost to make his nerdy white daughter a funky black girl. Entertaining without being brilliantly written. Great cover, though:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0312378556.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

nice

Just finished: David Thomson The Alien Quartet. This was really good I thought, despite a couple of odd misinterpretations. Made me go back and watch all the films again. It is a shame he didn't talk about the Director's Cuts, although possibly they weren't released when he wrote this. Are any of the other books in this series any good?

Nearly finished: JG Ballard, The Drowned World. Ballard is my favourite novelist, even when he is very heavily riffing off of Conrad as he does here. Nothing really happens as such in his environmental-disaster novels, but some of the images he evokes I just find so haunting.

Just about to start: Rihcard Price, Clockers

*Richard Price, obv

Nearly finished: JG Ballard, The Drowned World. Ballard is my favourite novelist, even when he is very heavily riffing off of Conrad as he does here. Nothing really happens as such in his environmental-disaster novels, but some of the images he evokes I just find so haunting.

Yeah, this is probably my favourite Ballard.

the idea of a conrad-> ballard thing is making them both more interesting to me. mb i should try them both again.

also i should dig out my copy of nightwood this week

i am in the horrible nested big book trap where i started reading dead souls and then started reading dr faustus and then started reading dhalgren, so before i read anything else i feel i have to finish dhalgren, and then finish dr faustus, and then finish dead souls

I bought Smallcreep's Day today why because it look intersting plus the title was naggingly familiar. I assumed it must've been filmed or televised or something. When I got home and Googled it I realised it was the title of a Mike Rutherford solo album lol

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallcreep%27s_Day

'stoned', andrew loog oldham's autobiography
'netherland'

Nathalie Sarraute - The Planetarium. Maybe a bit too similar to Do you hear Them? plot-wise. Such an in depth, rich dissection of motivation going on here tho'.

About to start on: Italo Svevo - Zeno's Conscience.

finished shalom auslander's foreskin's lament and another richard stark book, started arthur philips' the song is you (so far not terrible) and scarlett thomas' popco

nearly done w/ The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary

Sarah Moss: Cold Earth - a bunch of grad students on an archaeological dig in remote Greenland, while the rest of the world seems to be succumbing to some horrible super-virus. Well done so far, but having the first 100 pages narrated by a convincingly drawn neurotic pain in the arse who it's difficult to want to spend time with may have been a bit of a tactical mistake.

I'm still plowing through Rising Up, Rising Down and enjoying it, as far as such a book can be enjoyed.

Also just started How Fiction Works because I need to read it before it's due back at the library. I've never ready any of Wood's book-length criticism before and I like him.

just finished "Jaka's Story" by Dave Sim. Was really good.

reading through the Inner Worlds of Mental Illness anthology again (first person accounts of various mental disorders)...about up to the place where I left off last time...thought it was really interesting before but couldnt quite hang with it at that particular moment...

I just returned from an extended road/camping trip that took my wife and I south to Mt Shasta, Mt Lassen, Yosemite Park and the eastern Sierras, then back north via the Redwoods and the Oregon coast.

Along the way I read:

An obscure book called One Man's West, David Lavender, first published in 1943 and republished in 1956 with an additional chapter. Mainly a memoir that covers his life as a cowboy (and a brief stint as a hardrock gold miner) in Colorado in the 1930s. It was quite interesting and well written, with many well-observed anecdotes and a lot of shop-talk about what cowboys really did and how they thought. My copy was a withdrawn xlib copy that showed up in a local thrift shop. Not too likely any ILB member will run across it. A most likeable book, but destined to disappear, like most good books.

Fast Food Nation, a best seller from 2000. Told me things I knew and many things I didn't. I stopped eating fast food around 1978, but as the book points out, the ramifications of fast food extend far beyond the restaurants to affect food production from top to bottom. I'm glad I read it; it is a worthy tome in the best muckraking tradition.

Mr. Sammler's Planet, Saul Bellow. I am currently 70% through this and it has taken an unfortunate turn to tedious didacticism and specious philosophizing. After assembling a cast of somewhat interesting characters, Bellow has spent the past 25 pages sitting them down in a room together so he can use them as mouthpieces for his own questionable intellectual offgassing. Sad stuff, really. Too bad. I do not recommend it.

Bugger--I've got Sammler in the teetering to-read pile. Oh well. 'Fast Food Nation' was really good, though I can't imagine how it was turned into a movie.

reading:

eleven - patricia highsmith

i've been on an a.m. homes and mary gaitskill kick of late, and the girl at the bookstore recommended patricia highsmith next

GamalielRatsey, that's a great story. I find I have a copy of Markheim in a big book of RLS short stoires, so I shall HAVE AT IT!

I recently finished Paul Lafarge's The Artist of the Missing, which I read while home with the flu, and the combination of cold-medicine-induced delirium and Lafarge's wacky/surreal way with narrative motion made for a pleasant head-trip.

Now I'm back to John Hemming's magnum opus The Conquest of the Incas, which I formerly left off at around page 300.

Recently...
Conrad Aiken: A Heart for the Gods of Mexico -- odd
RL Stevenson: Markheim -- great stuff - GamalielRatsey really otm
J M Coetzee: Summertime -- yay! a return to the good stuff after a couple of pretty minor books from him

Just finished The Blood of the Lamb by Peter de Vries. This is the only book that has ever made me actually cry. In that American tradition that is not at all literary, but with that vein of directness that I've never quite been able to appreciate in Raymond Carver. It is clear, sane, funny and incredibly bleak and sad - looks unpretentiously at the limits both of faith and doubt (without in any way making those the subjects of what he is writing about).

Although not at all lyrical (it is brief and horribly to the point in its style) there are also moments of intense lyricism.

I haven't done it justice, damn, but this is a really good book, and it will make me return to his comic novels, which I've been able to see are well done, without actually enjoying them as much as I feel I should.

Reading Maiden Voyage by Denton Welch now, his first novel.

The only De Vries I've read was Slouching Towards Kalamazoo, which underwhelmed me a bit. The arch tone of the narrator started to grate after a while - like someone who compulsively cracks wise - his need for a joke to fill the space is palpable, though the jokes miss at least as often as they hit. It kind of reminded me of a mediocre indie comedy film peopled with oh-so-eccentric characters that you're supposed to find inherently lovable and interesting (e.g. "Little Miss Sunshine").

Yep, that sums up pretty well the feeling I get from what I've read of his comic stuff as well. I like it more than that, and feel that maybe I just need to get used to the tone, but that comment about compulsively cracking wise had me nodding.

I think I know what you mean about the indy film thing - but I'm not sure you're supposed to find the characters lovable or interesting, and there is a feeling of suburban nightmare even in his lighter stuff, which helps leaven the tone. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm not sure the blackness that is in The Blood of the Lamb isn't inherent in the earlier, whiter comic material, and that reading that book has convinced me to go back and have another look.

If you are at all tempted to read Blood of the Lamb, really don't let your distaste for his comic stuff put you off - the comic style becomes, in the context of the very bleak material, a sort of biting wisdom - if that doesn't sound too unbearably pissy.

Well, you make "Blood of the Lamb" sound interesting, but my experience with "Kalamazoo" would probably keep me from running out to buy it. I will keep it in mind though. Maybe you're right that the characters aren't supposed to be lovable and there is a subtle bleakness underlying the comic tone - but if so, I missed it. It just seems to me that each character tends to become a one-note running joke - and if you didn't find the joke funny the first time, you certainly won't be laughing the 50th time.

No, I know what you mean - I found Comfort Me With Apples tiring for that very reason.

Perhaps fits into the category encompassed by CS Lewis' supposed whispered aside during one of the Inklings meetings in Oxford, where Tolkein was reading out another passage from one of his then as yet uncompleted Lord of the Rings volumes.

The anecdote runs something like 'Even the mild-mannered CS Lewis was heard to mutter under his breath, 'Not another fucking elf.'

used to love that story at fourteen

should i visit the inkling pub this weekend y/n

Er, yes? I met Stevie Winwood in there once.

And didn't Tolkien say of Narnia, "Tripish, I fear."

I've only read a few Devries books, but my favorite, The Cat's Pajamas and Witch's Tit lampooned faddish existentialist thought and literature (and pop psychology? - can't remember) while at the same time really effectively and poignantly describing an existential crisis. It was not like reading Wodehouse or something - more like Beerbohm.

I think I'll try those two next, bamcquern, cheers.

Also xpost, I hadn't heard that 'Tripish' comment before. Good stuff. I prefer Lewis as being less of a bore - there's a very good three-way conversation between K Amis, Brian Aldiss and him on science fiction at the beginning of one of the Spectrum collections - but much as I loved both the Narnia books and the Lord of the Rings as a child, I feel very little attachment to them now. I re-read all the Narnia books recently while convalescing, and while some of them are quite charming and magical, (I have soft spot for the Horse and his Boy) something like The Last Battle is just really weird, patrician and dull.

As for The Lord of the Rings, vast tracts of Teutonic tedium interspersed with the tiniest elements of human emotion and excitement. HOW long does it take for Sam and Frodo to get from just outside Mordor to actually throwing the damn thing in the Pit of Doom? And how long does it take just to get to Rivendell for fuxache? I can make an exception for the still thrilling Mines of Moria. In fact The Fellowship of the Ring is by a long chalk the strongest of the three for me.

So Tripish and Not Another Fucking Elf get the thumbs up for me - the mystery is how they could sit round as adults listening to this nonsense. (But Out of the Silent Planet and Voyage to Venus are really good - That Hideous Strength though is [makes circular motion at forehead with forefinger] but enjoyable enough I suppose.)

Christ, rambling.

'voyage to venus'?? my copy is 'perelandra'. which is so much better. that one is weird in a similar set of ways to 'the last battle' though. (er, have you by any chance read 'the case of conscience' by james blish? it's a more science fiction-y science fiction novel about life on another planet and church heresy. it makes kind of an interesting comparison. probably.) TLB is actually my favourite lewis, though i find it quite horrifying, which was admittedly probably not the goal.

LOTR is sooo tedious. there was this horrible period while i was in sixth form when everyone was reading it because of the movies and it was just — that's MY thing, you jocks, get away! and it's not even any good! trust me! i know! — also, later misprision by various parties means i can only read the exciting bits by visualising them with lead figures on a grid and six different sorts of die lying around.

That's a fair summary xp. The Shire and the other early bits have stuck (with a faintly sticky tweeness) but the later books haven't at all other than the odd detail (even with the help of the films). I was going to posit that Tolkien did not do epic well, but then does anyone do epic fiction well? I've been noticing that all the stuff I've been enjoying recently is above all a tangle of minutiae. The book just kind of explodes upwards out of sight after the Mines, except for the bit in the marshes.

I spent a significant part of my early teenage life reading into the back story - the Silmarillion, Lost Tales and all that - not a jot of which I even remotely remember now, other than a scene where two of the most significant historical figures stumble upon each other in a forest clearing, and just stare at each other then run away, that being the only time they ever met. I thought that was nice.

It was Perelandra in the states, which as you say is much better (although I quite like the B-movie tone of Voyage to Venus. I didn't mind all the weird quasi-religious stuff in it, I have to admit.

I haven't read any James Blish, although I have heard of The Case of Conscience. I'll put it on my reading list. A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M Miller is another religion, heresy, science fiction one. It's pretty good.

My favourite bit in the films is in The Return of the King where there's that absurd hobbit pr0n slo-mo bit where they all bounce around on the bed and Gandalf stands there smiling on benevolently like an elderly p a e d o groomer. That took ages to finish as well, after the actual finish had happened. Didn't even have that bit where the hobbits return home and find Saruman has turned the Shire into a light industrial development.

The Hobbit is ok. Why am I talking about this? Gah.

The Balrog inflicts d20 damage and kills you with his ball of fire. You die.

xpost, yep, completely agree about the lack of detail IK. Mystifyingly empty.

just finished:

Daniel Dennett "Consciousness Explained" (huge tome, took me all summer, really fantastic though- highly recommended to anyone interested in philosophy of mind and neuroscience)

Samuel Johnson "Rasselas" (fun and silly, always meant to read this and now I have)

currently reading:

Walter Abish "Alphabetical Africa"

The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol.

dope collected tales imo

Abish's Alphabetical Africa? Ace!

Whizzing through In the Land of Invented Languages. The author is a babe.

but actually alphabetical africa's basically boring. can't be bothered. don't.

re: gogol: read through the diaryofamadman+others last week. might have mentioned that. don't know. i'm on a computer with a really small screen so it's kind of a pain to check. also dead souls. though i stopped after part one. dunno if the er gogol worldview is quite expansive enough for me to want to live in. if that makes sense. might get a collected tales though. i did see like eight dozen copies of 'the government collector' at work though. might get one of those first.

re: musil: trying to find to read + have opinions; failing

I've been reading The Lost Art of Walking, Geoff Nicholson. I love walking. I do it daily. It is my meat and drink.

Sadly, this book is a pastiche with nothing much to say. It looks like the author submitted a proposal that named every possible angle on walking that he could think of: historic figures, obsessive walkers, psychogeography, walking streets in L.A., London and N.Y., street photographers, and so on. It must have looked like one hell of an impressive proposal.

When it came time to write the book, he had almost nothing to say about any of these subjects. The only reason I will most likely finish it is that it is such a quick, easy read that it is easier to finish than to summon the will to toss it aside.

Don't bother starting it. That would be even easier than reading it.

Thomp: I wish I had not a single opinion on Musil when I finished (especially as mine weren't a lot more than 'this is great omg!'), so I think you're on the right track.

Abish: How German Is it is brilliant, but can't say Alphabetical Africa appeals to me, nor any kind of epic Oulipian adventures. Has anyone read his other fictions and poems?

Reading: Hasek - The Good Soldier Schweik.

Good Soldier Schweik! I read that when I was quite young, at the recommendation of my dad. It took me a while to get into it, but I was sad when it ended, it felt like something that could go on forever and never stop being fun.

Read recently:

Neil Gaiman - The Graveyard Book
Cormac McCarthy - No Country For Old Men
Leonard Sciascia - To Each His Own

Currently in the middle of:

Italo Calvino - If On A Winter's Night a Traveler
Rene Daumal - A Night of Serious Drinking

Re-reading:

Tove Jansson - The Summer Book

I'm reading The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. It took a while to get up much enthusiasm because it's quite a dull opening - a rather unattractive old couple moaning about old people things - but the rest of the family appear soon enough and I'm drawn right in.

I've had a good run of books set on fault lines of generational, ideological or ethnic divides - how dull, initially, the Midwest seems in comparison! Had I not been softened up by Updike I'm not sure I'd've got over the hump, but it's been worth it. The human conflicts are still there, you just have to burrow deeper to find them. The Rabbit books are vastly superior to this, of course, but it's still good.

reading a copy of anthony powell's 'venusberg', which is reissued in green integer, which is kind of wtf

couple things it brings to mind: there's this thing i note, more in american literature, but in english as well, of the past couple decades, where at some point a central character gets sent off to a developing-world country where REAL THINGS HAPPEN and PEOPLE LIVE IN DANGER to accentuate a point about how er devalued mb modern life is? but i've been reading a lot of pre-ww2 british fiction lately where people get sent off to the developing world where real things happen and ppl live in danger mainly to point out how dull and uncivilised it all is. i'm not sure whether i prefer the pre- or the post- colonial cliche.

also powell's relation to musil might be kind of interesting to dwell on, at some point. (though i have found powell, here and in 'a dance ...' [i really can't call it 'the dance', i sound silly to myself even typing], less of a slog than musil)(not a slog exactly, i just wonder whether pushing through it is the right way to go.) i have forgotten what i was going to say. something about their different approaches to time and musil saying 'such and such was of the bourgeois lower middle class' and powell saying 'his father sold coal but he was editing a Communist periodical'

also powell's idea of the tedium of pre-war europe vs evelyn waugh's apocalyptic fatalism about it, which latter seems a lot sillier to me now than it did at 19-20

I think Venusberg is my favourite of his. There's a strong feeling of melancholy throughout it and some extremely funny sections.

Powell was a big admirer of Musil's.

I'm not sure how far I'd go along with your thoughts, thomp. Venusberg isn't actually a developing world place though, is it? And Waugh's travel writing on Ethiopa is very amusing, but his descriptions are no less cynical than his descriptions of home. In fact I'd say something that both Waugh and Powell have in common is that danger and death and violence are almost arbitrary independent of so-called civilisation - the England of Decline and Fall or From a View to a Death is downright lethal. People popping their clogs all over the place.

yeah, i haven't thought any of this through. 'developing country' is the wrong word, i guess. venusberg (not actually named thus - the best and most obnoxious gag in the book is that lushington is presented to you departing for a Baltic state, "the name of which he could never remember"; this state of course remains unnamed throughout.) is newly ex-russian and apparently based on powell's time in estonia. the narrative becomes a lot less blasé about it all when people lushington actually knows gets shot.

powell's admiration of musil i'd come across before. it makes sense, sort of. i wonder if he read him in translation or the original.

i don't remember the deaths in decline and fall at all. or any of scoop except the outline, which i recall being vaguely similar to venusberg. oh, and "up to a point, lord copper." i should go back to waugh maybe. always meant to read the travel writing.

google result (nsfw, one imagines):

http://www.venusberg.de/

Since 1998! The First Virtual Erotic-Art-Museum Since 1998!

"TO THE HAPPY FEW !"

We will present you one of the biggest and most beautiful collections of European EROTIC ART from the 17th to the 20th century!

Meanwhile - September 2009 - we present you more than 3.600 Erotic-Art- Pictures!! (But with each update we will remove older series).

These watercolors, drawings and prints are an invaluable documentation of social mores and cultural history. They also trace the history of taboo, secrecy and prohibition.

We also have a GALLERY-ROOM, where we will show pictures from contemporary artists.

But first of all let these pictures be a pleasure for your eyes!

Ha ha. I wonder what Lushington would have made of that. Probably wouldn't have been that put out. I was just chuckling to myself remembering when Lushington is woken up by that valet who has been foisted upon him.

I'd never noticed that about Venusberg never being mentioned! Nice.

Powell read it in translation, I'm pretty certain. In fact he praises the Kaiser and Wilkins translation very highly. And now I need to find where he did this - almost certainly in one of his volumes of essays and reviews, I'll check later - because I see that the first volume of this translation didn't appear until the first two books of DTTMOT had appeared.

Will report back.

The description of a Mediterranean cruise and the famous account of the coronation of Haile Selassie by Waugh are amazing. I've got an old Penguin with them in, entitled I think 'When the Going Was Good'.

The First Virtual Erotic-Art-Museum Since 1998!

Hmmm. This immediately got me to thinking what an anti-erotic art museum might be like. I quickly realized that such a thing is probably impossible. No doubt there's someone out there who would find any object, person or situation you exhibited to be erotic.

Good Soldier Schweik! I read that when I was quite young, at the recommendation of my dad. It took me a while to get into it, but I was sad when it ended, it felt like something that could go on forever and never stop being fun.

Yes this mirrors my initial experience with the book. I found VERY funny but also extremely sad at points, an ugly harshness behind the gags.

Following this with Hrabal's I served the King of England

The Black Arrow - RL Stevenson. A Romance set in War of Roses period. Worst bit of dialogue so far -

'Where goeth me this track?'
'Let us even try,' said Matcham.

Prithee up your bum, good sirras.

I'm quite enjoying it, even though it's totally confusing, hectic without covering a lot of ground, and stitched together even worse than one of the leather jerkins everyone goes round wearing.

A binge of fun recently...

Richard Stark: Lemons Never Lie
Henry James: The Coxon Fund (a novella--I love the quote from the text on the back: 'The greater the windbag, the greater the calamity.')
William Dean Howells: A Sleep and a Forgetting (another novella, about how much YOU remain YOU if your memory vanishes)
Richard Russo: That Old Cape Magic
Eric Ambler: Dirty Story (overweight con man gets involved with making porn movie, becomes inadvertent mercenary "liberating" African territory for a mining corporation)
Somerset Maugham: Christmas Holiday

Evelyn Waugh: Helena
John Gray: Black Mass
Pynchon: Inherent Vice
Henry Green: Party Going
Old 18th-century habits coming back, so slightly scattershot reading of Hume and Burke.

theodore white: the making of the american president, 1960
peter hennessy: the prime minister: the office & its holders since 1945
more cordwainer smith
tony harrison's 'collected film poetry'

glancing in a lot of other poetry - james fenton, paul muldoon. also a cheap collected andrew motion, which is pretty dreadful.

finished the first volume of the man without qualities. finally.

Recently The Spoils of Poynton (James), The Line of Beauty (Hollinghurst, reread), The Little Stranger (Waters, a bit disappointing, maybe I'm tiring of her take old genre fiction and bulk it out with my terrific eye for period detail trick), Sorrows of An American (Hustvedt - very disappointing, one of those regrettable books that makes you wonder if your admiration for a writer's earlier work wasn't a lapse in judgement). Started Brooklyn by Colm Toibin.

I finished 'The Corrections' last night. It was really good, had me hooked like few books have in the last year or two. I was really looking forward to every opportunity to escape into that world, which was even more impressive because most of it was so ordinary. It didn't even need the Lithuanian bits, I don't think, Denise's story would have carried the action on its own.

I have a bathroom full of books to choose from now (we're recarpeting and they've been rehoused there temporarily). I'm thinking either 'The Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison, or the recent Lennon biography by I think Philip Norman. Not quite ready for the Austria-Hungarian stuff yet.

Maiden Voyage - Denton Welch (much prefer it to In Youth Is Pleasure, although IYIP does have a lovely lyric at the beginning of it. MV is an account of DW's school days, then a voyage to Shanghai. Paradoxically perhaps, it doesn't really go anywhere - that feature woof described in A Voice Through A Cloud - but I find his peculiar form of psychic description powerful enough for this not to matter, without him being at all likable. He is unsparing of himself.)

A Last Sheaf - Denton Welch. (Short stories, including an excellent one called 'Ghosts', poetry and black and white reproductions of some of his late paintings, which share the features of his writing - morbidly detailed, with oppressive sense of deathly life)

Poetry of Thomas Wyatt (Attractive if slightly trite-feeling lyrics, imitations and satires, which are occasionally vivid, occasionally cluttered, with that renaissance feeling of classical reference packed with English detail and description.)

Sorry that was a shit description of Wyatt, but I had to leave work for a train, which I didn't get, because I thought maybe I should cycle, but I didn't because I didn't have my mudguards, so I got a BUS, which got stuck in TRAFFIC. And when I got off the BUS, I landed ankle deep in a PUDDLE. And then all the TRAINS were delayed because of FLOODING, and then I got another BUS after standing in the pissing RAIN for an AGE.

Which is all by way of saying, isn't it time for a new thread? I was in Brompton Cemetary the other day and I swear the leaves were turning...

Yes, someone should - not me though, I haven't even got my first train delay through the 'leaves on the line' excuse yet.

Raymond Radiguet - The Devil in the Flesh. Short and intense early 20s French novel from a man who knew way too much too soon. Or so the cliche goes. Living really is hell.

Over the weekend:

Henry De Montherlant - Chaos and Night. I really liked parts of this once everyone goes into Spain - the bullfight was incredibly vivid, and I suspect that the more I'd re-read the more terrifying it could get. I like it that Montherlant makes it hard for you to engage with the man's utter sense of loneliness and the way he works at a blankness to everything.

Musil - Young Torless

Now: Joseph Roth - The Radetzky March

Not me either - I done it last time, and have regretted going full stop-capital letter, rather than ellipsis, ever since.

'The Devil in the Flesh' is great. His 'Count D'Orgels's Ball' is pretty good, too.

And then he died.

i just read that hustvedt book too, frankiemachine - i enjoyed it! i dunno, i really like the she writes, i find her style incredibly engaging and i like the way she builds this really sinister vibe that turns out to be quite marginal to the story (same thing in all her other novels). i've got yonder to read next.

Okay, rather reluctantly I have ushered in the autumnal equinox. Tell us what you're reading here -

It's Fall, and the Autumn of the year, and the store of fruit supplants the rose - so what windfall words have you been reading?

It's Fall, and the Autumn of the year, and the store of fruit supplants the rose - so what windfall words have you been reading?

Hope that works. I'm new to this.

Yeah, well done Gamaliel.

Yeah Dan the Hustvedt was generally well-reviewed and I really enjoyed "What I Loved" so I was looking forward to it. But I found I had massive problems with it.

They started with the epigraph by Rumi. "Don't turn away/Keep looking at the bandaged place./That's where the light enters you."

I didn't much care for this -- does light really enter a wound? Even a bandaged one? Even if it did, would you learn much from looking? It became a kind of metaphor for what I didn't like about the book. If you're going to be as relentlessly gloomy as Hustvedt is in this book, you'd better have some real insight to compensate. She certainly kept looking at the bandaged place, remorselessly so in fact, but for me not much light entered. Intelligence, sensitivity and truth to life are not enough - your book has to enrich the reader's life. I felt this one rubbed my nose in a lot of unpleasant stuff about life that I already knew, and mistook that for seriousness of purpose and unflinching integrity.

My second problem was what seemed a lot of undigested autobiography. Obviously you can't split the autobiographical from the fictional easily, but the starry New York intellectual lifestyle, the neurotic, beautiful, cerebral woman married to a famous novelist, the recently deceased father all point one way. I'm not objecting to fictionalised autbiography per se, but I started to read Inga particularly and some strands of other characters as versions of the author, and found myself increasingly turned off by the self absorption implied. For example, I'm sure the prying of prurient journalists into the lives of celebrity authors (and their wives) is pretty damn unpleasant, but the weight given to it by Hustvedt seems disproportionate in a novel that takes itself so very, very seriously.

Similarly Inga's near psychological collapse at the fear that her book might be published and pass without public notice is passed off as the justifiable fear of a hyper-intelligent woman that she won't receive due recognition in a male-dominated world. But it comes across as something much weirder - a sense of entitlement to the status of celebrity intellectual. This jars because, although we don't doubt her abilities, the number of people who become famous (or even semi-famous) for producing intellectual work will always be a vanishingly small fraction of the number of people who produce outstanding work. To hope for due recognition, the approbation of your professional peers and so on is natural and healthy. To believe that you'd have a legitimate grievance against the world if it denied you celebrity, even the somewhat rarified kind Inga aspires to, seems more than slightly loopy. Which would be fine if she was pure fiction, offered up for judgement as she is. But in a character who's manifestly a version of an author who has achieved some celebrity partly as a consequence of having a famous husband, and whose stock in trade is self awareness, it comes across as a curious and unattractive mixture of self-justification and self-pity.

This post has grown unexpectedly long and self-indulgent, so I won't lengthen it by going into detail about what seem to me egregious faults of structure (a mess IMO) and style. Generally Hustvedt writes well but there is a generous sprinkling of jaw-droppingly ugly or pretentious sentences. Some of the negative reviews on Amazon nail a few of these with more more perception than you might expect from Amazon reviewers.

This is highly subjective stuff - how gloomy is too gloomy, how can you be sure this is autobiographical - and plenty of reviewers liked the book. But it's damaged my romance with Hustvedt, probably beyond repair.

Still, as I say, the book was well reviewed and plenty of sensitive and perceptive readers seemed to like it.