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

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.

Outsider in Amsterdam by Janwillem Van De Wetering.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janwillem_van_de_Wetering#/image/File:Janwillem_van_de_Wetering.jpg

it's a fucking peculiar book, I tell you. or rather it's not so much the book but the translation... well, Wikipedia:

He usually wrote in Dutch and then in English; the two versions often differ considerably.

"Beg your pardon?" said Grijpstra.
"Imagery from the East," said de Gier. "Comes from my reading and it fits the case for this is a Hindist Society."

Grijpstra scratched the stubbles of his beard.

"If the civilians knew how silly their police, are they would commit more crimes"

in basic sentence construction it's a bit like reading john lanchester. mundane things and notions need to be carefully unencrypted. but the effect isn't totally displeasing - it's an oddly effective way of conveying foreignness.

the bald policier racial stereotyping (1975 if it matters) is harder to swallow.

"What makes this series so engaging is that the policemen are as quirky and complicated as the criminals."
Washington Post

because they speak as if hastily parsed by Google translate.

Initially, I was put off by The City And The City because of what seemed like an attempt at this kind of garbled gravel, which suggested those old animated PSAs starring MacGruff The Crime Dog, as parodied by sock puppet dog Triumph The Insult Comedian: "It was a dark und stormy nightski---for me to poop on!" But either CM later dropped/downplayed the "East Euro" shtick later, or the book got good enough that I didn't notice anymore (or both).

Christopher Paul Curtis, The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963

kind of garbled gravel, which suggested those old animated PSAs starring MacGruff The Crime Dog, as parodied by sock puppet dog Triumph The Insult Comedian: "It was a dark und stormy nightski---for me to poop on!

would read

I enjoyed The City & the City but strangely don't remember the "garbled gravel," maybe because the prose seemed breezier than I expect from Mieville. The Outsider in Amsterdam quotes oddly remind me of English as She is Spoke: http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/english-as-she-is-spoke-1884/

I love English as She is Spoke. "To craunch the marmoset" is a phrase which haunts me still.

Some of the lists read like Gertrude Stein portraits decades before the fact (which I don't mean as an insult to Stein):

Put your confidence at my.
At what o'clock dine him?
Apply you at the study during that you are young.
Dress your hairs.
Sing an area.
These apricots and these peaches make me and to come water in mouth.
How do you can it to deny?

Jane Eyre's backstory is very similar to Agnes Grey's (mother gets disowned for marrying poor clergyman), you'd almost think they are related...

The Outsider in Amsterdam quotes oddly remind me of English as She is Spoke: http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/english-as-she-is-spoke-1884/

I'd forgotten about this! I think it was reissued as a copy of the original imprint back when I worked in a bookshop, and it was handy to read in idle moments.

An Outsider in Amsterdam isn't quite as bad as that, but the sentences do feel fairly consistently off. I'm not sure whether that has a charm in itself but you do get used to it for the most part, even if the total effect only contributes to a general lumpiness.

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.

― the pinefox, Monday, November 10, 2014 5:12 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thanks, yeah that's what I meant. It was like Dylan used to be my bold young uncle, and when I finally listened to Blonde On Blonde. I was struck by his being so much younger than that now--but still dropping science on me. Re Joyce, I read Portrait and Ulysses so long ago, in school, so was really amazed by his youthful voice here, more vulnerable in a way, for the lack of constantly-risking-absurdity literary acrobatics---if he failed in this kind of deep social commentary, via focus on individuals, especially with less outspoken well-wishers and guardians of the status quo watching so intently---you want an audience, you got it kid---would have been much worse than just going off into stylistic doodledom for the nonce. Not worse than court actions vs. obscenity maybe, but bad enough.