Sumer Is Icumen In 2015, What Are You Reading Now?

I think what I like about James is how he knows (accepts) that in (Western) civilization wealth girds (supports, underlies) cultural aspirations (aspirations to immortality). (I think this is also what I liked about Piketty.)

I barely started Bernhard and did not start Castellanos Moya but aspire to return to them and in passing detect this ambition (particular to male European writers) to build (make) the human immortal (outside oneself) even as an affront to nature. I know this sounds like nonsense but on a separate occasion I thought it might make sense.

I am reading Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto. I used my local library's interlibrary loan service for the first time to get it.

I agree that Man in the High Castle and Do Androids Dream? are not Dick's best, but I'd probably include them in a top ten ... I see there's a POX thread already:

Phillip K Dick POX

nm I decided to start the Patrick St Aubyn series instead

― franny glasshole (franny glass), Friday, July 10, 2015 6:38 PM (2 weeks ago)

So I began this and was super into it, then had to stop due to the child-rape scene that I just couldn't handle. My son is roughly this kid's age which makes it impossible to read without picturing him, plus I am aware that the book is autobiographical and that fact shook me up too. I put it down about a week ago. Honestly not sure if I'll pick it back up, which is a shame because it is obviously quite good.

I barely started Bernhard and did not start Castellanos Moya but aspire to return to them and in passing detect this ambition (particular to male European writers) to build (make) the human immortal (outside oneself) even as an affront to nature. I know this sounds like nonsense but on a separate occasion I thought it might make sense.

There is a 'I am the last of a cultured lot, keeping the barbarians at the gates' thing to Bernhard. That could really grate except he is really funny and I think there is some self-awareness as to how ridiculous he sounds at times.

I am reading Sleepwalking Land by Mia Couto. I used my local library's interlibrary loan service for the first time to get it.

Tick! I do this all the time.

Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey, which is satisfyingly acerbic about the callousness and hypocrisy of the gentry but seems a little simplistic next to Charlotte's Vilette (though most bildungsromane would),
― one way street, Monday, July 6, 2015 7:14 PM (2 weeks ago)

Agnes Grey is such a neat and trimmed book, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall such an epic of horrors. Quite the unbelievable one-two.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall moved me as much as Wuthering Heights did at fourteen. I reread it four years ago and was still impressed. I'd love to assign it in a classroom.

My favourite PKD, though I haven't read it for years, is probably Ubik. Confessions of a Crap Artist really struck a chord too, though it's one of the non-SF ones.

Malcolm is a Little Unwell sounds amazing, Fizzles. I will seek that out.

Is 'Malcolm is a Little Unwell' e-book only?

I was amazed by The World Jones Made when I read that, far more than I was by The Transmigration of Timothy Archer which I read at about the same time. Don't think I've ever seen anyone else Stan for the former

Is 'Malcolm is a Little Unwell' e-book only?

― inside, skeletons are always inside, that's obvious. (dowd), Monday, 27 July 2015 08:30 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it might well be - i got the impression it was something designed to recoup some money in the aftermath of his (and his family's) financial collapse.

James, the book it reminded me most of was The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, also reminded me of K Amis's short essay A Peep Round the Twist - writings that I've tended to very loosely define as 'hospital literature' - descriptions of derangement involving medication or medical institutions.

As someone who, high on morphine, once thought some of the nurses were trying to kill me, I sympathise. In fact I'd paranoically garbled a nugget of truth into a structure of insitutional persecution, which was that the morphine drip had been put into a muscle instead of a vein, something which the nurses had ignored despite me drawing attention to it, because so much of what I was saying was bananas. I also thought that the person in the curtained bed next to me was having a huge party one night, that a challenge I had to meet to stay on the ward was to steal a london bus and get some pizza for everybody, and that my entire extended family, dead and alive had come to visit me. I couldn't be arsed to see them, leading me to tell the nurse to tell in fact my mum and brothers that I was busy for the moment and could they come back another day. (Thankfully they ignored this request, whereupon I asked one of my brothers to come on a walk with me to a place we couldn't be heard, and proceeded to tell him that a subset of nurses were trying to kill me.

Wrecked my tv so should be reading more, but so far it seems to be magazine articles largely.
Well, kind of stuck with nothing to do during the race fortnight where getting in and out of town is a pain.

Still going through Ford Madox Ford's March of Literature history of literature.
Also just started Naomi Klein's That Changes everything but not got very far so far.

Finished Scam a book about Irish Travellers family fraud in the US. Was pretty interesting, starting from a writer who was writing articles on them for a specialist mag called Trailer Life since there were a spate of trailer sale rip offs perpetrated. But the book is bookended with the story of a scam one family tried to pull on Disney World following hearing about the laxity of security therein.
A faked rape in a motel in the premises but it was blown before pay off.

The Gear Guide a short book from 1967 about the various places to buy fashionable clothing in London. Interesting and has me wanting to pick up the book Boutique London which loks at the same places in greater depth and written much later. Supposed to have some very nice photos in too.

'Malcolm is Unwell' sounds like it might be interesting to me as I've had similar experiences. I'm bipolar, but I have occasional psychotic episodes, including religious mania - I remember a cop asking me if I 'was blessed by Jesus or if I actually was Jesus' (the former). So I tend to track down stuff that helps me put that stuff in some kind of perspective. I'm just really bad at reading ebooks.

I've started reading The Travels of Marco Polo (Penguin classics edition). Very readable for something written in the 13th century.

Read that Marco Polo and the other obligatory at the time Medieval travelogue The Travels of John Mandeville several years ago. Very interesting stuff. For years, probably centuries it was thought Polo was based on experience and Mandeville was fantasy/allegory. But at some point it was suggested that Polo collected travel stories from other people while not actually travelling himself. He was just living located at a nexus/node point for travel to the East.
I read a book that investigated Mandeville and found descriptions of some places, I think the Crusader town Acre among them, accurate enough to indicate Mandeville had been there. Can't think of book title at moment.

There was also a Muslim travelogue from around the same time by Ibn Battuta which I've been meaning to read for years.

I finished Kafka's THE CASTLE

and started rereading Michael Wood, FRANZ KAFKA.

Also want to have a look at ZZ Packer, DRINKING COFFEE ELSEWHERE.

That's interesting about Mandeville & Marco Polo, Steveolende. I guess there are lots of theories and it's hard to prove anything conclusively from that long ago. I guess even if you accept the tradition that Polo told the stories to Rustichello while they were in prison, I'm guessing he didn't have any written notes to refer to (I don't know if he was even literate), and considering the long span of time, vast distances, and unfamiliarity with what he was seeing at the time, it would be amazing that he was even able to be as factually accurate as he was. If the tradition is right, he must have had a prodigious memory. No doubt Rustichello embroidered the core of the book with lots of borrowings/inventions of his own, in any case.

The controversy is discussed on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Polo#Debate

The Mandeville investigation was called 'The Riddle and the Knight by Giles Milton.
It does say that there is a lot lifted from elsewhere but does trace travel specific to the author.

Ibn Battuta is documented as travelling most of the way around the known muslim world of the time. Including stints of governing a couple of places.

really enjoying to the lighthouse now. the depth of the characters' inner lives and the simple humanity of it is affecting in a very true way. though i did find lily briscoe's revulsion at romantic love turning men into "laggards wielding a crowbar on mile end road" or whatever pretty funny. my version has a needless glossary and mile end road was listed as "a rough area in east London". how perfectly ghastly!

I just remember Mile End as being a station where we changed trains and had to wait when I wasa kid. I know it's on the Central line but not sure what it interchanges with or if it was just that the inner city line only went out that far and you normally had to change to get out to Woodford green and the like. A bityt like the Victoria Line would have trains stop at Seven Sisters or go on all the way to Walthamstow Central.

I'm assuming the Mile in the name is the borders of the City, the financial district.

I remember Mile End as being quite rough. Maybe it is no longer so.

it's not beautiful per se, but it also probably has a lot of millionaires living there. many very fine houses in mile end.

I'm assuming the Mile in the name is the borders of the City, the financial district.

I'd always thought that, and of course it's true, but not in relation to the modern district of Mile End. The original 'mile end' was apparently the turnpike situated at the junction of Whitechapel Road and Cambridge Heath Road. That is exactly one mile from Aldgate. The original hamlet of Mile End ('Mile End Old Town') would appear to have been somewhat to the east of that, in the vicinity of Stepney Green tube station. That's about two miles from Aldgate. Even further away, Mile End tube station is about 3.5 miles from Aldgate.

yeah it's quite a big kind of netherzone around there. even the footpaths aren't particularly well connected.

Josep Pla - Life Embitters. Finally getting into the swing of things and now its sorta unputdownable - a cat gets as much attention as hyperinflation in Wiemar-era Germany. Pla is not only a traveller, but a poor one so he hardly seems to make it to Paris or anywhere with any glamour, so he ends up in backwaters like Calais (and there is much of it being a border town, which is going to feel different today, given the news) or Ostend. Sometimes he meets family but often its other single people, the odd encounter, and very little that is amorous. He is a chronicler with no end to anything in sight, and little interiority or background.

re: Mandeville and Marco Polo - this is similar and awesome

I was amazed by The World Jones Made when I read that, far more than I was by The Transmigration of Timothy Archer which I read at about the same time. Don't think I've ever seen anyone else Stan for the former

v different books, I would stan for both. World Jones Made is one of his better mid-period works.

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY !

Finishing up (and enjoying) John Hawkes' Blood Oranges; virtually impossible to read it and not have the Will Ferrell / Hot Tub Love-ahs in mind for the narrator, Cyril.

"Oh,Lov-ah."

Sorry---love is catching, is it not?

^^^^^ this is basically Cyril's diction fwiw, when he's not talking about the colors he'll weave into his sex tapestry. Fun book.

Should I get this don't have any other CL
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/books/review/the-complete-stories-by-clarice-lispector.html?_r=0

story collections - joyce carol oates - high crime area & ethan coen - gates of eden
&
adam rapp - know your beholder
&
norman mailers marilyn book but i may stop reading this cuz mailer kinda sucks imo

Asking myself similar question, don.

Mailer's best book is Harlot's Ghost. Read that one.

* Peter Handke - Short Letter, Long Farewell
* Shakespeare - Richard II
Nikolaus Wachsmann - KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps
John Dinges - The Condor Years
Robert Browning - Poems

xp maybe sometime

I only started DORIAN GRAY.
I also started REALITY HUNGER.

But most of my reading is still Kafka: an old hardback starting with DESCRIPTION OF A STRUGGLE then a bunch of shorter pieces. The very short ones (like 'the top', 'the helmsman') are new to me.

DESCRIPTION OF A STRUGGLE is a remarkable piece of work - a missing link, if one were needed, between Dostoyevsky and Beckett, or Hamsun and 1960s metafiction.

Ellmann's Joyce
Ulysses
V1 of Roy Foster's Yeats
Bit of Aquinas on the side.

I've had The Apprentice Mage in my closet for years.

I've started it before, but more in the mood this time. Foster's great imo - great marshal of information, thoughtful, subtle, obvs great on context - but he can be a bit of a slog, not often a lively writer.

i would agree with all of that tbh

i think i've had that book literally half my lifetime and not got much beyond p100

I've started it twice!

I admit I have not properly read THE APPRENTICE MAGE either - and I have BOTH VOLUMES a couple of feet from me - but actually by many standards of historical scholarship, I think RFF *is* a lively writer. Maybe less so in this work, but certainly in MODERN IRELAND, LUCK AND THE IRISH, THE IRISH STORY, VIVID FACES. A tremendous historian.

I have read Ellmann's WBY biography in full.

i am reading about morality : (

i am reading the Dispossessed. Did I already mention that?

agree, by the standards of most contemporary historians (low bar maybe) he is a good writer, especially over shorter distances - part of what sent me for another go at MBY V1:TAM was his DNB entry on Yeats. But I remember MODERN IRELAND being a bit of a grind - I have it around more as reference than reading (haven't read his others).

Hrabal - Harlequin's Millions. About half-way through and today was just thinking how good this is. Its very Eastern European (really Hungarian) in the way it handles nostalgia for a past that has been crushed by ugly historical forces, but how Hrabal writes about people and what they do - how they embrace and drink together at a pub over a football match - that says much about how they go on whatever is happening in the background.

The writing shapes up as different from Krudy et al. tho' in the way it unravels and expands, each chapter is one paragraph. Ultimately he likes to show-and-tell in streams and recount other stories and experiences instead of character and dialogues.

Lately, I've been reading Jane Bowles's play In the Summer House and the stories Paul excised from Two Serious Ladies (the narrative thread following Senorita Cordoba, originally the third serious lady), René Crevel's My Body and I (interesting so far for its gracefully winding prose and the vigor of its disgust, as well as its reflections on queer life in 1920s Paris, although so far those are elliptical and couched in much the same perhaps defensive tone of disdain as are the comparable scenes in Sodom and Gomorrah), Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others (remarkable for Chiang's ability to revolve conceptual problems, although so far his prose and his characters are typically blander), Shirley Jackson's late fiction in Come Along With Me, and Lyndall Gordon's biography of Charlotte Brontë.

I am back from the mountains. While there I read The Painter of Signs, R.K. Narayan, and O, Pioneers!, Willa Cather. I'm also partway into King Leopold's Ghost. Because I drove 350 miles today, I think I'll wait and write a few comments on these tomorrow or the next day. I'm tired.