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

The Confidence Man is good but I have only read 50 pages. I need a few hours of concentration and no worries to break the back of it.

Meantime I have finished:

Jane Bowles - Two Serious Ladies

About to finish:

Kurt Tucholsky - Castle Gripsholm. This is a good find. Like Robert Walser he seems to have written short stories for Feuilletons of the day and this begins like a bunch of those stories expertly put together. Starts with a back-and-forth between the author and publisher on the stories he is looking to buy (love stories, natch) and royalties that he'll get. Then we dive in: a couple, train journey, holiday. Then they come across a girl, she is crying and in distress and run away from a boarding school because the headmistress is up to no good. Because this was written in '32 as the Nazis were to take over this takes on those tones. You read the author has committed suicide a few years after this. It wears its lightness darkly and all but I wonder whether the biography surrounding this will take over. It is funny, and slight on purpose too and that is more than ok.

enjoyable writing jam session. Fans of this approach should def check Neil Young's Waging Heavy Peace, which works a time-space groove like no other, but does remind me of TP's more enjoyable transitions, minus the murk (says me, but there were some complaints from some fans, as there always are, no matter what he does). NY recently produced a second memoir and announced that he's working on a science fiction novel.
My local library's only copy of The Brothers Karamazov is the Constance Garnett translation, but I finally picked it up and went right through the first 30 pages, then had to peel it way because Xmas chores. But soon and very soon, the rest will be another gift to self.
Recently finished My Brilliant Friend and need to cool off a little lest I babble "spoilers," but---do believe the hype.

Cool. Are you going to start the second one?

"Deejay activities alternate with live local bachata groups, a bright, twangly mandolin / bottleneck sound, an impossible-not-to-want-to-dance-to beat"
-- BLEEDING EDGE

"an impossible-not-to-want-to-dance-to beat"

"why, my six year old could talk gooder than that..."

just read Merritt Tierce's debut novel, Love Me Back, and immediately wanted to read the whole thing over again from the beginning. it's horrifying and excellent.

Susan Fast, Dangerous - A new entry in the 33 1/3 series, every bit as good, I think, as the justifiably acclaimed Carl Wilson and John Darnielle volumes.

Having done with Rabelais, I have just picked up Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer's book about the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon. The writing style is ferociously overwritten and grossly self-involved, but this is offered to the reader as if it were all a sly joke.

It actually works as humor for a while, but after 50 or so relentless pages of this the humor is wearing thin and the self-aggrandizing poses begin to seem far too threadbare not to be Mailer's normal state of mind. Unless something happens soon that is not grotesquely Mailer-centric, I will throw this book at the wall.

ha i love that book!

Welp---Robert Lowell, William Sloane Coffin, Doctor & Mrs. Spock, Ed Sanders, Paul Goodman, a Nazi, a Capitol cop, and a lot of people trying to levitate the Pentagon are among those who show up, and he's interested---he's also Mailer of course, but when he gets interested, can be a pretty good describer (though more in his reportage from conventions).

Colm Toibin - Nora Webster

He might be, quietly and persistently, our best conventional realist novelist.

Oh yeah, heard interesting Fresh Air interview re the one about Mary, not too thrilled about being boosted from mother to Mother. Thought about reading that one (& NM). Is it good?

I think THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT is really good!

I think Toibin as a journalist is an incredibly slack writer. I was not very impressed by BROOKLYN. But perhaps his other novels are better.

BLEEDING EDGE seems to be the second best Pynchon novel I have read yet.

Brooklyn was one novel I didn't finish this year. There may have been others. I read the first half of Howard Jacobson's J, skimmed the second out of bored curiosity.

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

reassuringly awful

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n24/tom-mccarthy/writing-machines

Brooklyn isn't a great novel but it offered consistent pleasure; I practically read it in one sitting in summer '09.

He's never written one outstanding novel. He reminds of William Trevor in that way: consistent pleasure.

reassuringly awful
tl;dr

But lol at taking Ballard at face value in the part I did read.

xpost James, I hope to read the second Neapolitan Novels fairly soon; will say more on dedicated NN thread when get some homework done.

I loved Brooklyn but not sure what to read by him next.

His first story collection boasts a couple of stunners.

A 1/3 of the way through Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida on Penguin (selected and partly translated by Robert Chandler). So far I loved Pushkin's The Queen of Spades and the surprise of the collection is The Greatcoat by Gogol. Never held him in to much affection when I tried him years ago. My fault then. Certainly like to pick up more by him.

Turgenev and Tolstoy's stories are nothingy. Dostoevsky's Bobok is amusing and I can't wait to give a couple of his novels another go next year.

Sounds interesting. I read a Pushkin short story collection I really liked a long time ago called The Captain's Daughter, looks like it is still in print, although some complain about the translation. Search: the story "Snowstorm." Also Search: Thorold Dickinson's underseen, underrated film version of The Queen of Spades. May be Anton Walbrook's best performance. Search also, although not Russian, the same actor-director team and the superior if suppressed, original film of Gaslight.

I am borrowing The Captain's Daughter from the library (same translator) (NYRB bought out a paperbk of it last year) and the film looks good too.

I'm also reading Pushkin!

Will check out the NYRB version, thanks. One I had was old Vintage edition. Cover art teh awesome, though:
http://img1.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n6/n34100.jpg

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."