Spring 2007: What?! Are You Reading?

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Just read P.D. James' An Unsuitable Job for A Woman and The Skull Beneath Her Skin - enjoyable escapism and now I'm looking forward to reading her Adam Dalgliesh series.

Since I've been on an not written in English mystery/thriller kick, I also read Arnaldur Indridason's Jar City which was oddly compelling and disturbing (what is it about these Nordic folk that they can crank out such delightfully twisted stories?).

And now, for a complete change of pace, I've just started (four pages in) John Harding's One Big Damn Puzzler - this is blurb from the back of the book:

"On an island paradise somewhere in the South Pacific, Managua—the only native who can read or write—is busily translating Hamlet into pidgin English when a plane interrupts his noble work. Strapping on his false leg, he makes his way to the landing strip to greet the unexpected arrival: William Hardt, a young American lawyer driven by his misguided ambition to win reparations for the island's inhabitants.

Hardt is not the first white outsider to pay a visit; the British came earlier, bringing their language, the small pigs that run wild in the jungle, and Shakespeare . . . and the Americans followed with guns, land mines, and Coca-Cola. But in this place of riotously logical ritual, Hardt's determined quest to do good could make him the most devastating visitor of all.

Profoundly moving and achingly funny, One Big Damn Puzzler brilliantly explores the collision of the twenty-first century with unsullied pagan reality—and establishes John Harding as one of the most imaginative contemporary chroniclers of the human condition."

Sounds a bit overblown and yet I'm feeling optomistic that it'll bring some good escapism (which is what I really need right now).

― MsLaura, Monday, 23 April 2007 22:19 (seventeen years ago) link

Hrm, what's a good first P.D. James novel? I've read very little crime fiction, but suspect I could enjoy some of it.
I tried to read her Children of Men a few years ago when I was on a big ol' dystopia-kick - but barely got ten pages in.

Currently reading the new Norman Mailer, The Castle in the Forest. I'm rather loving this. "Adie" Hitler, devils, the theory of greatness through incest, stories of the tough lives of bees... what's not to love? First time I read Mailer, too. I didn't realize Mailer was funny! I've always had the impression that he was some dull old troll.

After this, I intend to read Franzen's The Discomfort Zone. I avoid memoirs and the like, but a (very negative) review someone posted here really got my interested in this one.

― Øystein, Monday, 23 April 2007 22:50 (seventeen years ago) link

Carolyn See" 'There Will Never Be Another You' - dystopia-ish book set in 2007 (and, at the end, beyond), published in 2006 - she didn't give herself much time for her dire predictions to kick in

Just started - Joseph Conrad: 'A Personal Record'

― James Morrison, Tuesday, 24 April 2007 01:49 (seventeen years ago) link

I'm in the middle of Moby Dick. That chapter with the catalogue of whales slowed things down a bit, but it's all good.

Recently reread The Good Soldier and Cruddy, both classic. Still need to finish Tropic of Cancer.

― clotpoll, Tuesday, 24 April 2007 04:32 (seventeen years ago) link

I like P D James -- I've read most of her detective fiction, also Children of Men and her autobiography. She's very consistent, you can start just about anywhere. Her Toryism will make her hard to take for some people though. She's the sort of person who genuinely thinks that Tories are nicer people and have higher moral standards than socialists. Related to that her work is drenched in nostalgia for a past of better manners and decent values that never existed outside the imagination of people like P. D. James.

I just finished Olga Grushin's "The Dream Life of Sukhanov". I was hugely impressed -- the best first novel I've read in ages. It's a kind of "Master and Margarita" lite, but more sophisticated and original than that suggests. She handles the intrusion of surrealistic elements beautifully, more Grass or Bulgakov than "magical realism" (a style I don't much care for).

It's not perfect -- the main thematic concern is the nature of art, the function of the artist etc and her point of view is a kind of old-fashioned High Romantic exaggeration of the importance of Art that seems to me conventional, overblown, self-regarding and slightly dotty. She has real talent as a descriptive writer, astonishing for someone whose first language is not English, but can occasionally be self-indulgent and too eager to explain everything, especially in the last quarter of the book. All the same I can't recommend this book enough it sounds at all like the sort of thing you'd enjoy.

― frankiemachine, Tuesday, 24 April 2007 11:07 (seventeen years ago) link

LB is informing my reading these days, in conjunction with the hold process at the library
I've finally returned to the library after many years, and being able to reserve online and check on the status and renew online thereby not being restricted to your own branch is really working for me.

― James Redd and the Blecchs, Tuesday, 24 April 2007 20:55 (seventeen years ago) link

As a result I haven't bought one single book in about a month although, since the library doesn't seem to have any of those interesting-looking Patrick Hamilton books, I may have to change that soon.

― James Redd and the Blecchs, Tuesday, 24 April 2007 21:13 (seventeen years ago) link

I had the same thing, James, and after effectively exhausting what the library did have of Hamilton's, I ended up buying Hangover Square and loving it. But it's pretty sad that your library doesn't have ANY Hamilton.

― franny glass, Tuesday, 24 April 2007 21:40 (seventeen years ago) link

Hey, don't knock my library, apparently it's got the highest circulation of any system in the country, and that's even without the help of its other, still-prodigal ILB son, Casuistry.

― James Redd and the Blecchs, Wednesday, 25 April 2007 03:03 (seventeen years ago) link

Hm, looks like they've got some copies of Angel Street, some DVDs of a miniseries of Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse, and a copy of Hangover Square in some branch somewhere that I'd have to actually goto since it's not requestable in the system. Also, Alfred Hitchcock's Rope comes up for some reason.

― James Redd and the Blecchs, Wednesday, 25 April 2007 03:11 (seventeen years ago) link

That reason being because he wrote the play!

― James Redd and the Blecchs, Wednesday, 25 April 2007 03:12 (seventeen years ago) link

And Angel Street being the play on upon which Gaslight,which also had a third title at some point, The Murder in Thornton Square), is based.

― James Redd and the Blecchs, Wednesday, 25 April 2007 03:20 (seventeen years ago) link

Are you in the US or the UK, franny?

― James Redd and the Blecchs, Wednesday, 25 April 2007 03:22 (seventeen years ago) link

Hangover Square seems to be included in something called Three Unusual Crime Novels, marked as reference only located in something that doesn't even seem to be a real branch, so I guess if I want to keep up my non-buying streak I have to read the play Angel Street before buying the new NYRB Slaves Of Solitude with introduction by David Lodge.

― James Redd and the Blecchs, Wednesday, 25 April 2007 03:34 (seventeen years ago) link

Neither! I'm in Canada.

My library (Toronto Public) also has most of Hamilton's stuff marked reference-only and un-requestable, which is such a pain. Slaves of Solitude is one they did have available, which was lucky as it's freaking great. Definitely worth buying.

― franny glass, Wednesday, 25 April 2007 13:43 (seventeen years ago) link

Haha, that was going to be my next guess.

― James Redd and the Blecchs, Wednesday, 25 April 2007 13:49 (seventeen years ago) link

That or Australia.

― James Redd and the Blecchs, Wednesday, 25 April 2007 13:49 (seventeen years ago) link

Does it count as "circulating" if you never return the books to them?

― Casuistry, Wednesday, 25 April 2007 14:53 (seventeen years ago) link

Good question. I'll have to dig a little deeper.

― James Redd and the Blecchs, Wednesday, 25 April 2007 16:25 (seventeen years ago) link

Perhaps lots of people exercise their fifty books maximum out at a time option, which inflates the numbers.

― James Redd and the Blecchs, Wednesday, 25 April 2007 16:27 (seventeen years ago) link

I've nearly finished Life With Father. It is a quick, bouncy read, where every chapter is an amusing anecdote and none are more than a dozen pages, and most are around six. Many ILBers would finish it in one sitting. The writing is quite solid (and refreshingly untouched by Hemingway's influence, since it was written around 1920), while the psychology is both sound and insightful without being obtrusive. It stands up well, I think.

― Aimless, Wednesday, 25 April 2007 17:13 (seventeen years ago) link

Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity - David Brakke

The Swimming-Pool Library - Alan Hollinghurst

Still with the Steve Stern short stories collection.

― Arethusa, Wednesday, 25 April 2007 21:51 (seventeen years ago) link

'Six Degrees' by Mark Lynas - great but very depressing

What do you think of The Swimming-Pool Library, Arethusa? I wanted to like it more than I did, having greatly enjoyed The Line of Beauty, but Hollinghurst seemed so much in luuuuurve with his own protagonist that it really got on my nerves.

― James Morrison, Wednesday, 25 April 2007 23:26 (seventeen years ago) link

Hahahaha. I know exactly what you're referring to, but I'm still charmed by the obvious fact that Hollinghurst had a lot of fun writing this. My attitude to Beckwith is a little more ambivalent but I'm not annoyed yet. It's fair to say that my interest always spikes when he's interacting with other characters though (especially James) rather than when I'm left with him and his inner thoughts.

It's my first Hollinghurst. He never caught my interest until his fantastic TLS Commentary article on Ronald Firbank was published not too long ago.

― Arethusa, Thursday, 26 April 2007 18:43 (seventeen years ago) link

Am now reading John Updike's 'S', which is fun, but slightly hamstrung by the fact that, for the story to work, the first-person narrator needs to be a nitwit.

― James Morrison, Friday, 27 April 2007 00:14 (seventeen years ago) link

Oh S is great fun. She's not so much of a nitwit, later on. The bit about reminding her soon-to-be ex about airing out the sheets to get rid of the "body smells" and dust had me laughing in embarrassed recognition.

― Jaq, Friday, 27 April 2007 01:20 (seventeen years ago) link

Actually, I think you might be right - I posted the above when only 30 pages in - now I'm getting on for half-way and she's definitely growing on me.

― James Morrison, Friday, 27 April 2007 05:02 (seventeen years ago) link

Instead of reading more Moby Dick, I read Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Quite fantastic, though it does make me hate humanity a bit.

― clotpoll, Saturday, 28 April 2007 11:49 (seventeen years ago) link

Jasper Fforde's The Well of Lost Plots. It's (I think) the third in the series, and I've not read the first two, so I'm taking a while to get oriented, but it's made me laugh out loud several times already and I'm only at chapter 3.

― franny glass, Saturday, 28 April 2007 19:55 (seventeen years ago) link

ballard's crash

― stevienixed, Sunday, 29 April 2007 07:00 (seventeen years ago) link

With Chatwin - Susannah Clapp

how was this M. Coleman? i think i threw Shakspeare's Chatwin bio across the room in frustration before he got to the good stuff - mainly because he was taking so long to get there but also because his constant reiteration of what a remarkable gifted child chatwin was through anecdotes i could barely believe was wearing me down and making the child Bruce seem like an annoying little prick.

― jed_, Sunday, 29 April 2007 11:56 (seventeen years ago) link

quite compelling I thought, an unusual mix of publishing memoir (Susannah Clapp was Chatwin's editor) and regular biography. she manages to be affectionate and still frank -- adult Bruce could be precious and annoying too and his capacity for self-mythologizing seems to be boundless. her accounts of editing Chatwin is fascinating if you're into his writing or a writer yourself, all his books were drastically cut from lengthy manuscripts which I never would have guessed. she's fairly critical, doesn't seem to think the novels were completely successful and strives to clarify some of his blurring of fact and fiction. of course that's a theme in his personal life too.

― m coleman, Sunday, 29 April 2007 17:11 (seventeen years ago) link

m coleman - cool, I'd like to read yours - only read one so far, and it ws v negative on it.

xyzzzz here's my take on Jon Savage's Teenage. Cut by about 25% but that's the reality of newspapers...at least it wasn't re-written.

http://www.calendarlive.com/books/bookreview/cl-bk-coleman29apr29,0,4384212.story?coll=cl-books-features

― m coleman, Sunday, 29 April 2007 17:18 (seventeen years ago) link

I have to say Hollinghurst has half convinced me that I want to be a rich and fabulous gay man.

― Arethusa, Sunday, 29 April 2007 20:01 (seventeen years ago) link

Two absolute blinders over the weekend...
Booth Tarkington: Penrod - genuinely hilarious, and surely an inspiration for the Richmal Crompton 'William' books I reread obsessively as a child
Gert Ledig: The Stalin Front - like a WW2 version of 'All Quiet on the Western Front', only nastier

― James Morrison, Monday, 30 April 2007 00:32 (seventeen years ago) link

And a third - Andre Gide: The Vatican Cellars

― James Morrison, Tuesday, 1 May 2007 00:35 (seventeen years ago) link

gah! The library-hold-powers-that-be have decided it is time for me to read a pile of mysteries: a Tony Hillerman, a Carl Hiaasen, a Martha Grimes, a Michael Dibdin, along with Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Perdido Street Station. Just finished Ian Buruma's Inventing Japan, 1853-1964, which was enlightening.

― Jaq, Tuesday, 1 May 2007 17:12 (seventeen years ago) link

The Wedding Jester confirmed my belief that Steve Stern is one of the best living American writers around. He's a favourite of mine, anyway. :p

I've started The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion by Ford Madox Ford and tomorrow I will commence the Edith Grossman translation of Don Quixote.

― Arethusa, Wednesday, 2 May 2007 04:32 (seventeen years ago) link

Ooo, 'The Good Soldier' is - well - really good. If it's your sort of thing, follow it up with Malcolm Knox's 'Summerland'. It's a book whose plot is overtly modelled on 'The Good Soldier', and which includes a writer who creates her "masterpiece" by ripping off 'The Good Soldier'. No, wait! Come back! It's actually not at all irritatingly post-modern - it's really good, and maintains all the groovy storytelling verve of Madox Ford's original book.

Myself, I just finished 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union' by Michael Chabon, which I enjoyed so much I can forgive its flaws, and am now on Jed Mercurio's 'Ascent', which is ace so far, and making me wish I was not at work so that I could read it (not that I'm actually working, gievn that I'm looking at ILB).

― James Morrison, Friday, 4 May 2007 00:30 (seventeen years ago) link

I finished The Well of Lost Plots (brilliant) and am now waiting to pick up Beckett's Three Novels from the library holds desk. I read Godot last week and am a bit pissed off I waited this long to read Beckett.

― franny glass, Friday, 4 May 2007 12:10 (seventeen years ago) link

I've been reading American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips, in which he says that many things are wrong with the way the USA is currently governed, most especially:

1) the growing power of Christian fundamentalists and theocrats,
2) the lack of government response to obvious problems, such as peak oil and global warming,
3) the enormous and fast-growing national debt, both federal and personal,
4) a weakening dollar, which might collapse in value, and
5) lastly, an overreaching and expensive foreign and military policy.

All of which goes to show that Mr. Phillips reads the newspaper attentively.

In his favor, he does a very nice job of tying all these trends into a broad historical context, both in terms of US history, showing where these trends came from, and in terms of global history, comparing the current US hegemony to several earlier empires and what undermined them in the past. It seems the USA is travelling a well-trodden path to imperial decline and our chosen way to go to hell is not very exceptional.

IMO, if the USA can decline without dragging the whole world down with it, then it might be no bad thing. This is a big 'if', sadly.

― Aimless, Friday, 4 May 2007 17:11 (seventeen years ago) link

I started Beckett's Three Novels last night. 300+ pages of unbroken prose without even so much as a new paragraph sounds like exactly what I need right now.

― franny glass, Sunday, 6 May 2007 12:58 (seventeen years ago) link

" 300+ pages of unbroken prose without even so much as a new paragraph sounds like exactly what I need right now"

i think those books are more importand and ground-breaking than really good.(though of course they are good),Beckett i think,is one of those writers whom the writers who took influence from him are better than the original.
yet again, at the 40's those books probably looked better

― Zeno, Sunday, 6 May 2007 20:09 (seventeen years ago) link

Just finished "Wounded" by the criminally underrated Percival Everett. One of his best, too.

― James Morrison, Monday, 7 May 2007 00:16 (seventeen years ago) link

I finished reading Walter Lippman's Preface to Morals, which despite the kind of off-putting title is actually a very interesting piece of cultural and psychological observation that is surprisingly still fresh and relevant considering it was written in 1929. Now I'm back finishing up White Teeth.

― o. nate, Monday, 7 May 2007 20:14 (seventeen years ago) link

Molloy is pretty nice. After that they sorta jump the shark.

― Casuistry, Tuesday, 8 May 2007 03:44 (seventeen years ago) link

i should get back to the big box o' beckett, probably. oh, for my dissertation to be finished.

― thomp, Tuesday, 8 May 2007 12:08 (seventeen years ago) link

just finished Why God Is Not Great by Christoper Hitchens. somebody gave me a copy, problably wouldn't have looked at it otherwise but it was less hectoring/polemical than I feared, actually quite informative though it didn't convert me to atheism (from agnosticism)

just started Kingsley Amis: A Life by Zachary Leader and predictably got absorbed right from the get-go.

― m coleman, Wednesday, 9 May 2007 10:27 (seventeen years ago) link

Just finished Lolita. Just started The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by Amos Tutuola, and I'm already in love.

― clotpoll, Wednesday, 9 May 2007 11:52 (seventeen years ago) link

The Amis bio is a great read.

Just abandoned "The Book of Lost Things" by John Connolly, tedious fairy tales by numbers with none of the charm of Gaiman/Clarke/Pullman or Rowling, and started "Carter Beats the Devil" which I'm enjoying very much so far. The characterisation is a bit two dimensional, stylistically it's adequate rather than inspired, but any weaknesses more than compensated for by great storytelling and atmosphere.

― frankiemachine, Wednesday, 9 May 2007 12:53 (seventeen years ago) link

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