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

sorry, garbled but you get the idea

Cool! Which translation?

always been tempted to pick it up when i see it in second hand bookshops but never have. only ever seen it as a two volume picador paperback from the seventies, no idea who did that translation.

been reading a bunch of michael innes crime/mystery novels.

YT is short. You'll figure out right quick whether you want to give The Man a try.

Reading Seven Men by Max Beerbohm, recommended on an earlier version of this thread. Good fun so far, I need fun. I gave up on the first St Aubyn book, just couldn't stomach it. Since having a baby and losing a family member to cancer I find I cannot read anything that involves innocent people suffering. It means I barely read anything. I need recommendations for books that are meaty and beautiful and wonderful BUT don't involve anyone getting hurt ever. These obviously don't exist so I am stuck with PG Wodehouse and, like...Dr Seuss. Beerbohm is good value so far though.

always been tempted to pick it up when i see it in second hand bookshops but never have. only ever seen it as a two volume picador paperback from the seventies, no idea who did that translation.

been reading a bunch of michael innes crime/mystery novels.

that's the wilkins & kaiser translation. i think the more recent wilkins (not the same wilkins) and pike translation is generally better respected and also contains extra material but I haven't read it. also haven't read all of the picador ed. find i read it, enjoy it while I'm reading it and then just don't want to be reading it any more. posts itt have prompted me to pick it up again tho.

what's the michael innes like, nlt? I'd've sworn blind I'd read some - there were always plenty on the shelves at home when i was growing up - but I've just looked at his wikipedia bibliography and i dont think i have.

Glad you like the Beerbohm, Franny!

i was wrong about the picador being two volumes...

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-VhEZY3C67xQ/Ut5Ud24wFpI/AAAAAAAAG4A/gA69Noa3nH4/s1600/manwithoutqualities.jpg

...thanks for the info about the different translations

finding innes entertaining, if not quite living up to symons' criticism: "...rather in the manner of Peacock strained through or distorted by Aldous Huxley" (if only!). the appleby ones i've read so far are very much in the cosy tradition where everything is put to rights at the end. appleby himself is a bit of a cipher figure, somewhat wimsey-ish. currently reading the first in a series about his other (amateur) detective, the irascible society painter honeybath who's seeking to bring to justice a gang of bank robbers who have duped him into acting as an accessory.

man, those schiele covers are yoga flame all time. they went through a couple of uglier iterations.

i have 'finished' musil, sort of. it took two years, i think.

nice review of musil translation here. useful book!

i have 'finished' musil, sort of. it took two years, i think.

took me about that too. the last bit is a real slog, it definitely loses its way towards the end. my battered copy of it is one of my prized possessions, partly cos of the differences in my life from when i started it to where i finished it. i used to work in the car park of the cement company my dad worked for in the summer, and i was always reading this, i like how grey dust still falls out whenever i open it.

I picked up the 100 Year Old man Who Climbed out The Window and Disappeared in a charity shop yesterday among a bunch of other stuff. Started reading it in bed last night and have read the first couple of chapters. it looks promising .
I do still have the rest of Wolf Hall to read though and my life is a bit disordered as are all the rooms in this place.
So not sure what attention i can pay to any book until I have the place in order.
& do really thi8nk that I should be finishing one thing before I start another, but things get buried and other things are easier to find.

last night i fell asleep on page 240 something of barnaby rudge and woke up on page 360 something... of an ebook...

the last bit is a real slog

i thought it was building up nicely! unless you mean the hundreds of pages of stuff in the new edition after the 'end' of the old volume three, which i just didn't have the strength for

my edition is the big brick new edition from the 70s, is that the one you have? i can't remember where the volumes begin and end, it's prob about 2009 that i finished it, but i read the entire thing, the storyline with his sister only had flashes of worth.

I like the first few chapeters where both Ulrich and Agathe are getting re-acquainted, then it somewhat loses shape.

Really want to read those sketches as translated by Pike, wish those were issued separately.

yeah from memory i'd agree with that, their relationship was interesting in the beginning, i can remember thinking she seemed a sort of narrative device, like a mirror image of him, but i'd need to read again to be sure.

Thanks, guys. Fizzles, I'm seeing Selected Writings--Torless and several short stories etc.---translated by Burton Pike, is that the one you mean? US Amazon doesn't have anything listed as by Pike and Wilkins, only xpost Wilkins and Kaiser.

xps Thanks James! I'd forgotten who it was that recommended it. I'm looking forward to reading Beerbohm's essays after I've finished this one.

i still think starting musil with torless is like starting your shower by towelling yourself off

Thanks, guys. Fizzles, I'm seeing Selected Writings--Torless and several short stories etc.---translated by Burton Pike, is that the one you mean? US Amazon doesn't have anything listed as by Pike and Wilkins, only xpost Wilkins and Kaiser.

― dow, Tuesday, 11 August 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Don't know what's US amazon, but basically.. http://www.amazon.com/The-Man-Without-Qualities-set/dp/0394510526

I think the 2nd vol has some extra material not covered by the old translation.

US Amazon because I thought Fizzles might be looking at UK Amazon; anyway, thx. I'll prob get that and this too:
http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Writings-Torless-Perfecting-writings/dp/0826403042/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1439330541&sr=1-5

Pitol - Art of Flight. Probably the most European-looking Latin American writer I've read, not least because he has spent a lot of time in Europe - as both embassador and translator. This is part I of his Trilogy of Memory but its actually a collage of journals of sometimes abandoned sometimes successfully completed writing, flat-out diaries (his own months of scavenging around Barcelona), some political journalism (the Zapatista uprisings) and then stretches of lit crit. Vila-Matas wrote the intro by saying Pitol is life and literature fused as one, and its sorta true - you get to spend time with him walking the streets of Venice and covering novels that were set there, and its hard to see where one starts and the other ends. All done in a jumbled sequence that actually doesn't make that much of a difference. Read it v fast and I want to get hold of the 2nd volume (not sure when the 3rd is coming out) and see where this is going. Assume 'nowhere' is the answer.

I'd be surprised if this lasts in English. I've read about 70% of what he talks about and only people who have read a similar range might get as much out of it. There isn't enough travel and people decoupled from all that mountain of reading, but maybe that could change in vols. II and III. That is what makes him so different from a travel writer - he has read more, and he is more politically engaged - whereas I often found travel wrietrs to be er, touristy. Caveat that I haven't read much of that in years. xp

hey James how is that Martian Dawn book? Had never heard of Friedman before but looks right up my alley

I am casting about for my next book, following Leopold's Ghost. I may land on some more R.K. Narayan, but I just bought a copy of Dorn's long poem Gunslinger and I may be drawn in that direction.

Too hot around here for another serious book right now.

hey James how is that Martian Dawn book? Had never heard of Friedman before but looks right up my alley

Joshua Mohr: All This Life -- gave up on this. Seemed specious and pseudo-profound, a bit like how I imagine a Franzen book would be, if I ever read one. All the reviewers love it, though.

Edith Templeton: The Darts of Cupid---picked this up in the library shop, where the opening namesake pulled me right through its 65 pages, with some head-snapping turns (simple male mind had to be told again). The setting is a WWII US War Office in Bathgate, later London, staffed by British female civilians, fed up with husbands, and overseen by British and American officers, all male, duh (the boss is also a doctor). More good points about codes of gender, class, professional status, educational background, workplace, etc. than many novels can manage, without lecturing or filler (would advise a few cuts, but just sentences here and there).
The characters' uses of humor---as tools, weapons, armor, gifts, taxes---have me thinking "British Dawn Powell," although Powell fan Gore Vidal's blurb compares this Edith to Wharton, "cool stare" and all. The narrator of this title story does makes a point of being a tough young cookie, but she's honest about the gaps in her armor, and the ones she can't or won't fill in.
Hope the others in this collection are nearly as good.

Started a Narayan novel, Mr. Sampath - The Printer of Malgudi. It's rather nice to start a book that is not a major commitment of time. This one is just under 200 pages.

Through with the first volume of Jane Eyre, finishing Angela Davis's Women, Race, and Class (such an important intervention), reading Ingeborg Bachmann's formally halting but affecting breakdown poems from 1962-63, and starting Bhanu Kapil's Incubation: A Space for Monsters.

Back to the bucket list/books I should have read in school: Their Eyes Were Watching God seems like art-folk-pop---even within musical distance of another belated read, One Hundred Years of Solitude, at times; also seems like an ancestor---a proudly roving auntie---of African-American entertainment's more caffeinated inspirations.Maybe even the better "chick lit," if I knew anything about that first hand--did enjoy the movie and soundtrack of Waiting To Exhale, even though Hurston's tropical heroine leaves those citizens in the urban Sunbelt dust. Some of them aren't unlike the confidante, frenemies, and other audience members she comes back to, however.

Miklos Szentkuthy - Towards the One and Only Metaphor. Like Musil's Diaries at times - composed of 112 sections, this one puts a bunch of reading together with sketches of characters of this never-to-be-written-up novel. Sees himself as a container for thought and feeling and time itself (no wait come back). Written in '35 so in the shadow of Nazism as well (Hitlerism and Proust). I suppose I mention Musil in the sense that he is in the habit of following a thought through thoroughly but they aren't philosophical. The thing is followed through to a nonsensical result - which can be ok as long as it appears to be literature. Also cf. Musil there is an erotics there - thinking around the body.

The analogy in the intro was of someone looking at this as you would the stars in the sky and then all of a sudden you are grouping them towards a constellation. There is a hint that would happen after a few readings.

Proceeding backwards through 20th Century lit(which is also how I spent much of my share of the 20th Century itself, at the time), getting more and more of a sense of the dynamic attraction and danger of the crowd--"the holiday energies of the masses," as a unnamed revolutionist, quoted by Richard Wright, puts it. Hurston's Janie seeks, finds, realigns communities and families in the crowd, and these run their courses---inside a minute, over decades, whatever it takes.

The characters' uses of humor---as tools, weapons, armor, gifts, taxes---have me thinking "British Dawn Powell,"

try her 'gordon' to add weird sex to the mix

edith templeton, that is, not dawn powell

dow have you read canetti's crowds & power? (I haven't, came close to buying it the other day but it was kinda pricy for a 2nd hand book)

Canetti's on the list, but I hadn't thought of that title specifcally; will check it out, thanks. Weird sex in xpost "The Darts of Cupid" too, re the story's complex mapping of gender inter- and intrarelated regulation, compliance, resistance, and/or transactional tensions, erotic friction,sparks (gifts, taxes), but not s&m, more unexpected than that. Also, the narrator's ideal is love as drug, flotation in the self-aware vanishing point.

But I haven't told all of it.

just read, & really enjoyed: https://nplusonemag.com/issue-23/fiction-drama/nine-inherited-disorders/ (DISCLAIMER: not a book)

Finished Towards the One and Only Metaphor. Plenty of thoughts on Powys, Browne (need to read him) and Joyce (he translated Ulysses to Hungarian and he wasn't fazed by FW as it was being published) and much more. Real keeper of a book.

My bourgeois self is currently getting a kick out of Steppenwolf.

on an actual book-reading tip: I find something deeply appealing in the combination of sentimentalism, chemistry, and 19th century Age-of-Progress humanist ideology that is Jules Verne's L'Île mystérieuse (the first part, anyway -- not sure how things will change once the "mystery" rears its head)

I'm finishing Jane Eyre and returning to Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex: the chapter on race has aged extremely poorly, and her use of Freud is unhelpful when she discusses homosexuality, but I totally love the breadth, polemical energy, and woolly utopianism of the work, like a much shrewder and less abstruse Anti-Oedipus.

Spending half of my time transfixed by some of the sentences from Platonov's Chevengur as collected in The Portable Platonov (this has a play, a couple of short stories and a section from The Foundation Pit which has now been fully translated) and the other half on Hjalmar Sodebergh's account of doomed love in A Serious Game, accompanied by all the abrupt expressionisms of the time (1912)

(btw, there is only 50 pages worth of Chevengur, about a tenth of the bk)

Hjalmar Sodeberg is a wonderful writer. i wish more of his stuff was in English--there's only 'Doctor Glass', 'A Serious Game' and a collection of stories available as far as I know.

I just finished a Swedish book of the same vintage (1908), Elin Wagner's 'Men and Other Misfortunes', a startlingly modern novel about four women flatsharing in Stockholm, their job(hunting) and relationships, fighting off sexual approaches from the boss, all that sort of thing. Very lighlty done, but impressive.

Finished "The Travels of Marco Polo". I thought it was pretty enjoyable, whether one believes Marco actually visited all those places or not, and there is clearly lots of second-hand material in there, whether he picked it up on his travels or while hanging out with other merchants in Venice or whether it was interpolated by Rustichello, it's still a pretty incredible collection of material, and fascinating to read as an example of a "bestseller" that predates Gutenberg.

Now I've started "The Stillborn God" by Mark Lilla, which if nothing else has accomplished the unprecedented feat of making me want to read Kant, though I'm fairly sure that will pass.

This forthcoming book makes me want to read Kant:
http://www.adamroberts.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/THE-THING-ITSELF-nick-fiddle.jpg

It's a riff on the John Carpenter 'The Thing' movie with a protagonist who is obsessed with Kant

Just read The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin. A+ stuff, scarcely dated. On a side note: my copy was printed in 1963, $1.65 cover price.

James, Norvik published Soderberg's "Martin Birck's Youth" iirc but that's the only other novel of his I've seen in English.