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

On going beyond desperation and despair---if enough people believe it---Wonder how many people in this country do? Someday it may be not just gospel, but Gospel.

(Ugh.)

Skimming a bunch of Arabian Nights-related material--bits the original text, an Illustrated Junior Library edition, Robert Irwin's companion--in preparation for teaching The Thief of Bagdad (1940) next week.

Robert Irwin's novels look cool. I was looking for his book on the Alhambra, which I'm visiting in a couple weeks(!), but it seemed to be missing from the stacks.

His 'Limits of Vision', about a housewife driven mad by household dust and descending into a microworld was pretty great.

Just read William Gibson's new one, which was clever fun if not mind-blowing, and am now reading Geoff Smith, 'Time of the Beast', about a monk hermit in the English Fenlands in 666AD, and his encounters with SOMETHING NASTY in the marshes. Very good so far, despite the hideously JPG-artifact-ridden cover the book has been saddled with. It's published by Dedalus, whose cover design in general is eye-wreckingly poor.

Just finished Wolf in White Van, wow.

Now back to the Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig, although the two I started with were so devastating ("Letter from an Unknown Woman," "Forgotten Dreams") I'm not sure how many I can take.

Finally read Dubliners. Love the intent observation and the improbable navigation through all the detail: can't call it "omniscient" narration in the lordly sense: early 20-something author knows he's still got a lot to learn about women, for instance/especially, and like some of his male protagonists (generally older and more experienced than he), the sense of surprise, in sometimes possibly teachable moments, is a recurring source of vitality, a key center, maybe. Also, there's a sense of compassion, or fairness---well, justice anyway, 'cause life ain't fair. But art can be, sometimes.
Also, unusually enough, it's making me monitor and question my own behavior, incl the binge of high-class reading: am I really learning from this, or is it just more status-seeking, if very belated? Can't take it with you (not all the way, but how far?)

Dubliners is really good. Perhaps only viewed as 'minor' because of who wrote it and what else he wrote.

My village library has two Colette collections, Gigi, Julie de Carneilha, and Chance Acquaintances: Three Short Novels, translated by Roger Senhouse and Patrick Leigh Fermor, also The Complete Claudine Novels, translated by Antonia White, both books with introductions by Judith Thurman. Worth reading?

I was reading Howard Jacobson's J but got bored. There isn't much tension generated from the clues dropped about what's going on...it seems pretty obvious and the characters aren't really interesting enough to carry it through.

Started the new Fuminori Nakamura book instead, which is way more fun off the bat.

have the day off from work, will probably finish Graham Greene - The Power & The Glory

this is the second of his novels I've read, after Brighton Rock last year, & as much as I worry about the schtick eventually wearing thin, man that's some good schtick

It doesn't wear thin imo. He wrote a few duds but the vast majority of his novels are worth reading.

I mean, if you read a bunch of them in a row I'm sure it'd wear thin pretty fast.

yeah I'm not about to jump right in to another one (already have Kafka's Trial on deck) but do you have any recommendations? Monsignor Quijote sounds interesting, but then I'm a sucker for DQ reimaginings...

My reading has been very undirected of late. I did finish the first volume of Foote, but have not yet picked up volume two. I currently am reading a novella-length story by Muriel Spark, Reality and Dreams. It seems thin in substance compared to her earlier output.

xp That's actually one of the two I haven't read yet, because I told myself I'd finish actual DQ first and stalled out around 1/3 of the way through.

The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair are both great and similar thematically to the ones you mentioned. Also great: England Made Me, The Comedians, Travels with My Aunt, but it's hard for me to make a concise list of recommendations. The quality is remarkably consistent for a body of work that spans most of a century. Basically just about everything up to and including Travels with My Aunt is worth reading.

The Man Within is good but is very much a "first novel", nothing at all like anything else he did.

I didn't like It's a Battlefield or The Captain and the Enemy.

My village library has two Colette collections, Gigi, Julie de Carneilha, and Chance Acquaintances: Three Short Novels, translated by Roger Senhouse and Patrick Leigh Fermor, also The Complete Claudine Novels, translated by Antonia White, both books with introductions by Judith Thurman. Worth reading?

Very much, though probably go with the Gigi/julie/Chance collection first. The Claudines are fun, but written under very odd circumstances (her husband basically locked her up and forced her to write them, including titilatting young-girl-lesbian hints, and then published them as his own work).

The Man Within is good but is very much a "first novel", nothing at all like anything else he did.

Veru much written in the shadow of R L Stevenson, which is not a criticism.

Thanks James, will check it out. Other Greenes I enjoyed (as well as Brighton Rock and Power And The Glory) 21 Stories, and several stories in anthologies, incl. speculative fiction, for lack of a better term (happy weird shit); The Tenth Man (good thriller, written as straight-up movie bait): A Sort of Life, one of his memoirs; Collected Essays (mostly tunneling back through sometimes odd Brit Lit, also Beatrix Potter; just whatever he seizes on while entertaining himself and readers ve. Great Depression and Battle of Britain), Collected Film Reviews (though not the one that got attorneys excited, in which he described Shirley Temple movies as pimped out [I'm paraphrasing]).Monsignor Quixote and a couple other late ones seemed kinda ho-hum at the time.
He's hard to keep up with, but somewhere in all this he parties hard in Batista's/Mafia's Havana (seems right at home), refers to himself in passing as "manic depressive" (believe the manic part), and that he used to pose as Grahame Greene, War Correspondent (only the first part was true), to hang out in war zones without getting hassled(also seems plausible, going by reading).

Grahame Greene, War Correspondent (only the first part was true) True enough when he was misspelling his own name, anyway.

H. Rider Haggard, She

Swinburne's poetry and The President Makers.

Packing books for a 10-day trip involving two 15-hour travel sessions. I'm going to bring the Scheper-Hughes along with

Margaret Mead - Coming of Age in Samoa
Ursula K. Le Guin - The Left Hand of Darkness
Mervyn Peake - Titus Groan

That oughta do. Also in the local library, just noticed: Arnold Bennett's The Old Wive's Tale, with blurbs from HG Wells and John Wain. Keyword: "Masterpiece." True, or anyway worth reading??

Rilke - Letters to a Young Poet. Feel this might be a good xmas present for a friend so I'll need another copy. Rilke really needs a substantial go to selection of collected letters but this particular selection is a marvel by itself -- love the advice and the games he plays with giving that advice, like when he says its kinda worthless (which he doesn't really) but goes onto really say things that seem v deeply felt, yet there is a weighed in humility and genuine good will, quite moving given that I don't think they met -- not sure you'd want to put this particular volume together with his letters on Cezanne and so on.

Thomas Mann - started making my way through some short stories (tr. David Luke). Tristan is reasonable. I can never get excited by Mann (all the supposed irony just doesn't work with me) so not a translation issue but I'll be giving Death in Venice another once over (and I really liked that) so we'll see.

"Tonio Kroger" was an immense influence on young me, and not just thanks to its straightforward depiction of youthful homosexuality; I loved the shift in time and tone.

I read Buddenbrooks finally last month and was surprised by how, well, almost breezy it seems. And The Magic Mountain is not breezy.

Nell Zink, The Wallcreeper: really good and bleak and funny, like early Lorrie Moore plus extra sleaze

i read a bit of 'to the finland station', it WAS breezy

That and Buddenbrooks could be beach-breeze-friendly reads (mind yer thin-page editions), but actually breezy their own selves? Seems reductive.

I finished my first Penelope Fitzgerald! The Blue Flower was just OK though. Will try The Bookshop next.

What took you so long?

ww1 novice starting basically from scratch, and just finished Sleepwalkers. It was great but a bit dizzying in its detail of diplomatic machinations. Tempted to complement it with Guns of August

like dow I read the whole of DUBLINERS (in my case again). I liked it and I think dow has a point (implicit) re: maturity, reading it with an experience eye, etc.

I also watched the film THE DEAD (1987) again and liked that too.

Ernest Hemingway, IN OUR TIME

Seems like EH tried to make literature as plain as possible and hence risked making it as dull as possible.

Ernest Hemingway, A MOVEABLE FEAST

more fun than usual cos about real people one is interested in.

Hugh Kenner, A HOMEMADE WORLD

brilliant critic but to be honest, not his best book; a lot of questionable stuff and, it seems to me, wheels spinning through empty air.

It's difficult for me to reread "A Little Cloud," for when I was seventeen I misread it and thought it was the last word on the difference b/w the guy who goes away for college and the guy who stays.

trying to juggle a few at the moment:

Gilead, finally.
The Peregrine, which I'm really excited about.
Miles, by Miles Davis.
The Cultural Turn, Fredric Jameson

Finished William Nordhaus's Climate Casino. Was a bit drier than it needed to be, but informative and, for the most part, persuasive. Now reading some of Isaac Babel's Collected Stories for a change of pace.

Xp let me know how The Peregrine is, I've been eyeing it for a while

o. nate, if you get back to climate, might try Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warmingby McKenzie Funk, about fwd-thinking moguls, incl. some who back denyin' pols. Also read appealing reviews of Naomi Klein's new This Changes Everything.

Recently: All the King's Horses, Michèle Bernstein's brief but witty YA novel about gender roles among the Situationists (Bernstein's sequel La Nuit, which hasn't been translated, sounds more interesting for its protracted narration of a dérive); Kathy Acker's Don Quixote, which I loved, which reads like Burroughs with considerably better politics, and which I need to think more about; Caitlin Kiernan's The Drowning Girl, which makes the most of its unreliable narrator in terms of flexible treatment of narrative time, and seems eerier because less florid in style than the early stories I'd read by Kiernan (whom I started to read because I'm interested in how trans women writers think about community, displacement, and embodiment); Julie Delporte's minimal but touching sketchbook Journal and some of Annie Mok's memoir-comics; Lynne Tillman's episodic traveler's novel Motion Sickness, which does interesting things with the accretion of minor characters and the late-80s waning of the Eastern Bloc but which ultimately seemed slighter than Haunted Houses (although I think I'm probably more interested in gender than in questions of national identity); Simon Hanselmann's collection of depressive stoner comix, Megahex, whose contents are much more claustrophobic in bulk; Benjamin's late essays on Baudelaire yet again; and the essays in Lukacs's History and Class Consciousness I hadn't read before (in the past I kept circling back to the essay on reification).

I'm starting Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina, Radio Benjamin (the recent collection of Walter Benjamin's radio scripts), and the first volume of Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life--so far it's interesting to see how heavily Lefebvre relies on the 1844 Manuscripts, and the way he veers between the lyrical and the polemical.

I read The Driver's Seat by Muriel Spark last night. It seemed like an exercise more than a story, but it was impressively better than anything else I've read in that vein.

I've just picked up the Screech translation of Gargantua and Pantagruel from the public library and am curious to see how he manages the trick of bringing Rabelais into modern English. How much I read of it will depend on how it measures up.

One self-correction: apparently La Nuit was translated by Book Works in 2013, but is between printings.

YA novel about gender roles among the Situationists YA?! Cool, take that, dystopian teen vampires.
P. sick of unreliable narrators tho.

I'm plagiarizing "YA" as a descriptor from the friend who lent me All the King's Horses, but it seems apt, since Bernstein was self-consciously writing in the mode of Françoise Sagan's Bonjour tristesse (La Nuit apparently has a similar relationship to the narrative methods of the nouveau roman) and both exploiting and implicitly commenting upon the commercial mobilization of youth.

Will have to read that and the Sagan, thanks. (Perhaps related: just starting that Colette collection of three short novels mentioned upthread, since it comes with good references from Ornamental Cabbage.)

Ian McEwan - The Children Act
Penelope Fitzgerald - The Bookshop

I am reading <i>Billiards at Half-Past Nine</i> and <i>The Shock of the New</i>. So far <i>Shock of the New</i> has been very informative

Really liked ´The Children Act', thankfully without the irony of ´Solar´. Valeria Luiselli´s ´Sidewalks' was a revelation, combining fiction and essays but sometimes reads like a diary (a very well-written diary that is). Now 100 pages into ´The Bone Clocks' by David Mitchell. The first part seemed a mashup between ´Black Swan Green´ and ´Ghostwritten´. Familiar territory.