Spring 2007: What?! Are You Reading?

'The Man Who Went Up in Smoke' by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo (there should be double-dots diacritics above all those Os) - great 1960s Swedish crime stuff
and 'Family and Kinship in East London' by Young & Willmott - fascinating classic book of sociology

Oh, I keep meaning to read the Sjowall/Wahloo stuff - good to hear it's great.

I finished the new Chabon - think I'll need to re-read it, 'cause I just didn't have the time or concentration to really ponder what I was reading.

Now onto Bryson's In a Sunburned Country which seems to be a lot closer to my speed these days.

Is that his book on Australia? It was thrillingly and originally entitled 'Down Under' here. Is it any good? He is hugely popular in Australia, but when I flicked through this one, it seemed very much, 'Gosh, what a lot of poisonous spiders/octopi/snakes they have, how funny that is! Ho ho!'

James, you nailed it. The poisonous or otherwise murderous fauna of the antipodean continent play a star turn in that book. They are inescapable. Bryson wrings them dry and then makes the reader chew on their dessicated corpses and swallow them down to the last morsel. Spit is optional.

He's fallen a victim to his own reputation, I fear, and now must toil to make us laugh forevermore, no matter how he feels about the matter.

Sounds like he's trying to give Paul Theroux a run for his money.

Just finished Martin Amis's House of Meetings and lovebug was otm, it starts out strong but runs out of gas at the end. Now am enjoying Nicole Krauss's The History of Love.

ethel wilson, swamp angel. a classic of BC lit that i have not yet read. 36 pages in, it is delightful.

interesting to hear the take on delillo's americana. he's probably my favourite author, but i've passed on most of his early stuff, excepting end zone and players, both of which i find very formative. after 1982's the names, incidentally my favourite, it's all really good.

Re DeRrrick on DeLillo: Yes, I've enjoyed all the other books of his I've read (except The Body Artist), but Americana is one flawed book. But as I said, the first 2/3 are pretty nifty.

The Story Of French, which is so far pretty dang good!

Some Frenchie guy was running it down in his Amazon review.

But then he would, being French.

Just started George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying. I thought it was supposed to be a funny one, but so far it's just really fucking depressing.

Funny? Not that I can recall.

Me neither.

I thought it was funny, but then again I've worked in a bookshop that was very like the one the main character worked in, with very similar customers.

Am reading the wonderfully odd 'The Pendragon Legend' by Antal Szerb.

It's a bit like a 1930s Scooby Doo written by a Hungarian genius version of PG Wodehouse.

http://www.pushkinpress.com/images/szerb_pendragon01.gif

Is it the Amazon reviewer who says this:

"A more specific comment: "Ave maris stella" means "Hail, star of the sea", not "Hail star of Mary" (p. 217)."

Because, uh, it was a common pun (which is to say, commonly understood to mean both) in Medieval Latin, as far as I can tell...

Yeah, that guy.

Actually now that I've finished it, that guy is totally off -- yes, one of the major points of the book is that French isn't solely of France, but it's not the complete Quebeckathon he makes it out to be.

Started Banville's The Sea last night, and am enjoying.

in between days... about to start Against the Day

This past week:
Milan Kundera - The Art of the Novel
George Saunders - The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil & In Persuasion Nation
Dag Skogheim - Sju Mann ("Seven Man")
Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49

Think I'll do more short novels now. I'm a slow reader, so it feels like a rare thing for me to ever finish anything.
Just barely started: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. For the first time! The only Twain I've read has been short stories and essays.

Considering it took me nearly three days to read The Crying... (weekend days, at that) I can only imagine it would take me months to read one of his other novels.

Over the weekend I bought:

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
Murakami, After Dark
some dude, the Interpretation of Murder (that one about Freud's one visit to America and trying to explain why he hated it so much in the form of a murder mystery)

And borrowed that new Anthony Bourdain book.

I've started reading A People's Tragedy, Orlando Figes. I mentioned it already on the 'books recently purchased' thread. I finished Part 1 (or was it Part I?) last night. Pretty good. Not as riveting as the jacket blurbs would have it, but pretty good.

I'm about to finish The Charmer, another darkly funny suspenseful story by Patrick Hamilton. It's the last of the ones the Seattle library system has. Next up, probably Carved in sand : when attention fails and memory fades in midlife, but maybe
Messenger of truth : a Maisie Dobbs novel, since both are the next ones due back.

Next up, probably Carved in sand : when attention fails and memory fades in midlife...are the next ones due back.

If you didn't return it do you think they'd cut you some slack?

Doubtful. Mr. Jaq is now very very tired of my joke, the one where he makes some comment about needing to read that book and me saying "oh, but - you read it last night dear!".

Right now for me it works like this:I read 60 pages of a library book the day I get it and then I put it down to try to finish whichever other ones I'm going to have to return soon.

Although sometimes I can make a sprint to the finish line with the new book, like with the new Susanna Moore novel, which I've got 20 pages left to go on.

The library gods laughed at me a week ago when I attempted to renew Special Topics in Calamity Physics. I'd just gotten to the party and someone had died. I had to return the book before finding out who. It's back on my request list, but I am number 167 :(

(I'm hoping it was the narrator's ne-plus-ultra father.)

broke my library dependence and ordered an oop book from amazon -- black & white by shiva naipaul, about guyana/jim jones/jonestown. he's vs naipaul's brother, wrote a few novels & travel books before dying young in the 80s. highly recommended by my pal martin amis.

in related news I finished The Life of Kingsley Amis which was good as advertised though I was a bit surprised by how much author zacary leader drew from kingsley's letters and martin's memoir experience.

currently breezing through mike connelly's echo park. another year, another serial killer. reading crime novels is like TV for me.

kingsley's discipline as a writer was ever stronger than his dipsomania.

inspiring -- the everyday writing sessions, not the liquid lunches.

Considering Leader edited the letters, maybe not so surprising? I disliked the letters, and like you I suspect regretted the bios apparent overdependence on them, but in the end what better source?

Martin's blessing was always going to matter after the Eric Jacobs fiasco, which may explain the willingess to follow the Experience line. MA convinced me in Experience (much better than his fiction) so I didn't mind.

yeah experience feels pretty reliable. i liked kingsley's letters more than you, certainly a book to read in selectively rather than straight through. larkin's letters are worth a look, leader draws on them a bit.

Bruce Catton's "The Civil War"

"weatherman" edited by harold jacobs - first-person accounts of the weatherman underground movement

How's that Weathermen book? I was obsessed with them a few years back.
I'm currently reading: Robinson's Housekeeping for the second time--it is just as moodily riveting as the first time through; McCarthy's Outer Dark which so far is much more Faulknerian than anything else I've read by him; and Through the Looking-Glass for the millionth time because why not.

I really like Shiva Naipaul, but I haven't read "Black & White" yet, though I do have a tatty old 2nd-hand copy in a box somewhere.

Having read the final Robertson Davies Salterton book (again, great fun), I'm now reading HG Wells' "Ann Veronica", which is ALSO great fun.

This library thing is turning out to be some kind of pyramid scheme.

Still on <i>Don Quixote</i>. (sigh)

Started Kate O'Brien's <i>Land of Spices</i> which I'm enjoying, so far, even if she's a bit of a judgemental omniscient narrator.

Started Sarah Hall's <i>The Electric Michelangelo</i>. The cover and the jacket blurb did not prepare me for the opulent descriptions of diseased phlegm. What fun.

Bloody hell forgot it was bbcode.

"Ann Veronica" (published 1909) must surely be the first novel in which a woman fights off a potential date-rapist using martial arts learned in a self-defence class.

Asa break from the Russian Revolution I read Do Butlers Burgle Banks? by P.G. Wodehouse. Up to his usual snuff.

I've got a copy that Orlando Figes book I bought around Xmas that one day I'll get around to reading. I think I got distracted around page ten, after reading about the mysterious powers of Rasputin.

Chris or Michael, please explain the ordering of items 2 and 3 in the table on page 451 of The Story Of French.

I haven't reached the page ten milestone yet, but the first seven pages of Adam Rapp's The Year Of Endless Sorrows are pretty amazing.

I've been reading fluff as of late - dealing with a house full of sick animals (hedgie with pneumonia, another hedgie with kidney failure AND neurological problems, rabbit that was spayed and had a surgery to open an ear canal, two other rabbits that had amputations) and not getting enough sleep or having enough unbroken periods of time to devote to something decent, means that my mind is frizzled. Anyway:

- Finished Bryson's In a Sunburned Country which was light and fluffy and entertaining so long as I ignored his idiocy (the man's obviously intelligent and he can write, so why does he come across as annoying? And why does he just mention interesting facts and then rush off to something that makes him seem like a jerk?). Think I need to read a decent book about Australia, next.

- Read Helene Turston's Detective Inspector Huss and its sequel, The Torso - the first was marvelous and intelligent and charming and twisted - the latter was crappy, under-developed, need a basic proof-reading, was full of gratuitious violence and gore, and had far too many plot holes (trust me, if I'm noticing plot holes with my fogged brain, there's far too many of them!).

- Followed by Diana Wynne Jones' Dark Lord of Derkholm and The Year of the Griffin both of which I thought were marvelously entertaining and I can't believe I'd not read them before (they'd been sitting on my shelf for several years - a thread on ILE, I think, gave me the kick in the ass to actually read them).

- Which were followed by the last two books in the Detective Joe Sandilands' Mysteries by Barbara Cleverly, The Palace Tiger and The Bee's Kiss which were suitably trashy and made for entertaining escapism.

- And then, 'cause I needed a change of pace, came Ruhlman's The Reach of a Chef which paled in comparison to his first two books in that ... series? Grouping? Anyway, felt like he was flailing around and hit on some good stuff and missed other and didn't seem to offer a whole lot that was new (though I fell in love with Melissa Kelly and if I ever open a restaurant, I want it to run like her's, on the same principals).

- And now I'm about to start The Necropolis Railway which offers the following blurb on the cover (from Simon Winchester):
Guaranteed to make the flesh creep and the skin crawl, a masterful novel about a mad, clanking fog-bound world.
It can't be too bad, right?

MsLaura, you're my hero :) If I had all that going on, I'd end every day curled up in the corner, either weeping softly or laughing maniacally.

I finished Carved in sand : when attention fails and memory fades in midlife, which I had hoped would have some actual science incorporated but it turned out to be a whiny account of a 50-something neurotic who wants a quick fix re: getting her act together. Lots of doctor shopping, lots of "ooooo, I don't want to take PILLZ! (Gimmeh that one plz! More plz?!?)", lots of blaming (diet, lack of exercise, non-attachment mother, being dropped on head, thyroid, etc etc etc), and the references are mostly to other pop science books and magazine articles instead of actual studies. The author lost all credibility with me when she referred to the Orange County airport as "that palace of marble and gilt". WTF?? I've been flying in and out of there for months and it's just another damn airport. Also, when she kept referring to herself as "high-functioning". Uh, sorry lady, I don't buy it.

I've been reading Enduring Love by Ian McEwan - surprised by what a page-turner it has been so far.

Well, The Sea was good if not mind-blowing. I enjoyed sentences and scenes individually far more than I enjoyed the story, but the sentences/scenes were good enough on their own that it never got tedious.

Now onto Martin Millar's The Good Fairies of New York which reads like a fucked-up children's story in novel form. Awesome.

I'm almost through with Delillo's Falling Man--it's much better than I thought it would be. Also raced through Mievelle's Un Lun Dun while waiting for my car to be serviced--it was okay, but not oustanding.

MsLaura, "The Necropolis Railway" was great, I thought. It seems to have ended up the start of a series, though I haven't read the others.

Ken: Ha! Good call. I think the Hindi/Urdu number might be a typo? These numbers don't resemble the ones on, say, Wiki, all that much.

I can't talk to you right now, Chris, I got to go pick up another batch of library books on reserve, even though I am not returning any of my backlog yet.

i just finished omensetter's luck and will probably do tarzan of the apes before i go back to moby-dick. also i found another heinlein juvenile second-hand today which will probably come up another fifty pages into melville. i may start a poll as to what should be my next stupidly long book after that, hah.

halfway into PKD 'a maze of death'

started george melly 'revolt into style'

finished a bunch of essays on Alain Resnais (the old 'cinema one' paperback by John ward) and a maddening collection of articles written by commie composer Hans Eisler. Really interesting picture of a time.

<i>Enduring Love</i> is indeed good. <i>Don Quixote</i>, I could see why it has the reputation it has, but a dull read for me. The Grossman translation doesn't match the hype, but new translations of classics so rarely do. It may improve on re-reading but I'm not particularly minded to try.

I've hardly been reading, going through a patch where music is obsessing me. I skimmed the last 100 pages or so of <i>Carter Beats the Devil</I> after not really giving it a chance, read it in too small chunks over a long period. Now reading Arlington Park, I feel pretty conflicted by Cusk whose massive talent is too much at the mercy of her neurotic gloom.

Anyone else read Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives?
I just finished it about 10 minutes, and it's a great read. Good enough to convince me to order By Night in Chile before I was finished reading the first book, just to have it ready to go.

There's a nice article about Bolaño and The Savage Detectives here

Just finished 10 minutes AGO, I meant. 2666 is due to be translated into English and published sometime next year, and is supposedly 1100 pages. I can't wait.

I haven't read Savage Detectives yet, but By Night in Chile is fantastic. It has one of my favorite last lines of all time.

I'm picking up the new Miranda July collection today. Just finished the new David Mamet and Christopher Hitchens books (in that order).

I have that Miranda July book on request at the library. I will most likely get it some time in 2010.

I have the Savage Detectives at home but I can't bear to open it up. Over the weekend I read Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed--good summer reading. In that vein, I checked out David Bowie: Living on the Brink, but I think I've already read it.

Having polished off two more parts of the Russian Revolution, I paused to refresh myself with Glacial Lake Missoula: And Its Humongous Floods by David Alt.

It describes the physical evidence for the existence of a mammoth lake in Montana, half the size of Lake Michigan, that filled behind a series of glacial ice dams, then repeatedly drained itself when the dams broke, releasing all its 500 cubic miles of water in a matter of days. Yes, I said days. That's about as dramatic as geology ever gets, except maybe for supervolcanoes.

Ooo! I have that book! Dramatic Palouse Falls in eastern Washington is probably the result of it draining.

I started reading that Iggy bio this weekend and had trouble putting it down, although I haven't finished it yet, when I went to bed on Sunday night I had just gotten to the part where they bulldozed the Fun House.

I think I read McPhee talking about that flood. Or something.

I need to decide which books to take on my trip...

For a second I read that as "talking about that blood" referring to Iggy's blood.

I've been reading Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstader, and am amazed I put it off for so long.

I'm reading Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass by Bruno Schulz, a book I've adored immensely over the past few months (including random recommendations to friends, associates, and well-wishers), despite having not yet read past page 50 - I imagine I've committed some sin there, but I can't be bothered to fully analyze my actions.

ALSO, I'M REREADING: The Gift by Vladimir Nabokov - actually I've been opening this up at random over the past few months and basking in whatever passage I come upon. I'm probably up to my fourth readthrough at the moment.

I've been wondering for the last five years or so, why the hell isn't Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass in print?

I'm thoroughly addled by that - I had no idea it was out of print (used copy, natch, from the "Writers From The Other Europe" box set released a few decades back).

Stephen Crane: "Active Service" - excellent

if you like Bruno Schultz, read the other genius,most original write from poland (who was also bruno's friend, and also was influenced by Kafka and avant-garde) witold gombrowicz:pornograpfia,cosmos,trans-atlantic,ferdydurke, all masterpieces.the sort of books Nabokov and the south american metaphysics writers (sabato,cortazar..) would have liked (and maybe they did,if they managed to read them).
he has this upgraded vision of the Faust myth, that is originay it's own, and it's fascinating.

about Bolano, i was kinda dissapointed by "night in chile", not as superb as some people said it would be,but "savage detective" and "2666" suppose to be much much better.

Alice in Sunderland: An Entertainment, a graphic novel by Bryan Talbot just arrived for me. It looks amazing. I love to be the first borrower of a library book, when it is all new and pristine and untouched.

http://www.grahamrawle.com/books_womans/cover.jpg
The rather amazing 'Woman's World' by Graham Rawle, which I'd heard about a while ago, but happened upon in a bookshop yesterday. For those who don't know about it, it's a (proper, somewhat Patricia Highsmith-like) novel constructed entirely from words and phrases cut out of 1960s women's magazines.

Like so: http://www.grahamrawle.com/books_womans/spread-large.jpg

I am all too tempted to say that, when a dog walks on its hind legs, we do not applaud that it does it well, but that it does it at all.

Yes, but have you read it? It's actually a very good book even if you read it without the context, and, though I can't say how without giving the plot away, the manner of its production has a real point.

Is that what Dr. Melfi was reading on the penultimate episode of the Sopranos?

the narrator's actually a guy

n.b. i haven't read it

is one of the people on this thread julio desouza? does he still come here?

Btw I watched Notes on a Scandal the other night and thought it was Patricia Highsmithy as fuck.

ha i said the same thing after seeing NoaS

I also watched NoaS the other night and thought it was poor, though many of the problems are there in the novel.

I just didn't believe that Sheba would have had an affair with Connolly, also true of the book, but made worse by Blanchett's never-out-of-your-face glamour and picking such a young looking actor to play Connolly. I also didn't believe that Sheba would have gone to live with Barbara near the end, either in the book or the film.

Dench's performance was good, but in the book Barbara's character is slowly revealed: it takes a bit of time to realise how unreliable a narrator she is, and to work out that she is a monster. Dench is a monster from the start. I'm not sure how much this is Dench's fault and how much the director's.

The lesbianism is also more in-your-face in the film than in the book --in the book Barbara is motivated by loneliness, social aspiration, lust for power, and dimly recognized sexual infatuation in more or less equal measures. They are all present in the film, but the lesbianism dominates.

I finished Zadie Smith's White Teeth, which had its moments - but overall I found it a bit overrated. Maybe three stars. The bits of small-scale observational comedy were better than the quasi-allegorical, portentous sociopolitical plotting that tends to take over in the last third, despite her attempts to keep the tone light and knowing by wink-winking the more obvious improbabilities. She seems to share her weakness in this regard with some other trendy young po-mo writers, like David Foster Wallace, who seem to have absorbed a baleful influence from writers like Pynchon.

Hello thomp...I come here every now and again, yes.

Just finished this little comp of essays on the politics of music (from the late 80s) that I picked up off the library shelf. A cpl of ok things but the essay on Ligeti ws...I dunno, he didn't even address Ligeti's break from serialism. The essay on minimalism had some of the (usual) unquestioned (not good, that) generalizations of the differences between European and US composition. Couple of ok ones, but I had to give it back so I couldn't re-read.

The 'Art into Pop' by Simon Firth and...somebody else. Nice enough history of the role of the art school in rock and pop, with some discussion of how certain concepts made their way.

Agree about Smith. She's a phenomenal talent, but she under-rates what she's good at (creating psychologically plausible, finely nuanced character) and over-rates the whole baggy po-mo nonsense - I think she feels she HAS to do that kind of thing to be taken seriously, and ends up imitating "big boys" like Rushdie who are not remotely as gifted as she is.

Yes, I agree - it's a strange pass that we've come to in literary history that in order to be taken seriously you have to be strenuously silly, but there we are.

julio, could i get your email address? i'm t✧✧.w✧✧✧@gm✧✧✧.✧0m. if it's not an imposition i'd like to pick your brains about something related to the london free improv scene. cheers.

-

i don't seem to have read much lately. i read a louis sachar novel.

huh. that's obscured my email address a whole bunch more than i was expecting. why'd it do that?

Yeah, I was wondering how anyone was going to decode that.

I've recently read Herman Hesse's 'The Prodigy', which was OK in a sub-Goethe way, and Gertrude Atherton's 'THe Bell in the Fog'. a collection of her Edwardian/Victorian suspense stories. THe title one is interesting - the central character is patently based on Henry James and his writing 'The Turn of the Screw', and the Henry James analogue develops a frankly creepy obsession with a beuatiful 6yo girl. Good, but odd.

i'm reading the second book of the 'prince of nothing' trilogy by r scott bakker. it's very good, but i don't think it looks as good on a book cv as the other reads here. but then i don't read for self improvement.

Experiencing pure enjoyment can be very self-improving.

Tom just seen it - as I think I know your surname I've emailed you from an account of mine. Let me know if you get it.

Been having probs w/home internet access so will check back/reply to anything on saturday.

The library has 2 of the Updike Rabbit books for me! In the week of not having anything from my hold list, I reread Steinbeck's Sweet Thursday.

Soon we shall need a new 'What Are Your Reading' thread for Summer 2007. I am not dissatisfied with this fact.

I plan to the next week camping and hiking, not forgetting to bring many books with me - ratty paperback books that I can read with grubby hands. The Russian Revolution magnum opus I am (still) reading shall not go with me. It is unsuitable for such pastimes, being both nice and pig-enormous. When I return, I shall reveal all.

speaking of the Rabbit books, I finally bought the Everyman's version w/ a gift card from xmas and am now mid-Redux and its been a great read so far...really enjoying, though I knew I would to be fair.

skimming through, someone mentioned Adam Rapp's Year of Endless Sorrows a while back. Read it maybe 3+ months ago, did like it quite a bit, can basically only remember hilarious workplace party scene w/ main character escorting bosses' daughter.

Just finished The Road this morning. It was my first c. mccarthy and I was somewhat disappointed. It was somewhat enjoyable, and a rather quick read, but it all just seemed rather pointless. And I guess I just didn't take to his prose, it seemed a bit boring to me.

Before that was Black Swan Green, which I enjoyed immensely. I was sad when it was over. Most sympathetic narrator evah.

Has anyone here read and enjoyed The Electric Michelangelo? I had to stop after 60 or so pages because it was all melodramatic, stylistically out-of-control pap. Not a moment could Hall let pass by without adding ornaments to make it profound. Why Hall? Why.