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.