The Decline and Fall 2016 of gILBert the fILBert: What Are You Reading Now?

"Axolotl" is a good one. The main English collection which is called something like Blow Up and Other Stories is full of good stories. I like the Spanish collections Bestiario, Las Armas Secretas and Ceremonias. I guess the last one is just a combination of the first two. He has a great story about Charlie Parker called "The Pursuer," told by a clueless music critic narrator.

Much as I like his short stories, I've never actually made it through a single one of his novels.

i think i even read hopscotch both ways? possibly?

yet all i remember is mate

I read that first as the English word "mate" and not the Spanish word for the herb beloved by the Argentines. /bilingual puns that you had missed

every story in the Blow-Up short story collection, er, blew my mind. my favourite was the one about the family that live in a big house with a tiger. also the newest edition is very pretty imo
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/612R7sXddlL.jpg

it's only a hundred and some pages so i'm trying to savour every page of A Month In The Country as long as possible. such a dream

ah yes sorry James yes the Fantomas thing is what I was thinking of

The Cortázar story you are referring to is Casa Tomada/House Taken Over and yes, it's a good one. Think the English collection is comprised of the collections I mentioned already plus those from Final del Fuego.

Truth be told, I know he is the poster boy of Boom translators, but Gregory Rabassa's work leaves me kind of cold and I don't have the skill and stamina to read a long novel in Spanish. Maybe I should look for which Cortázar novels were translated by Paul Blackburn and read one of those.

Cool, thanks all! Will seek out the Blow-Up collection, perhaps after finishing Hopscotch. I'm enjoying it - all of the jazz is a pleasant surprise (apparently Cortazar played trumpet himself), although the Latin-Franco machismo and La Maga as a manic-pixie-dreamgirl avant la lettre grates a bit (I guess it could be read parodically? but that seems quite charitable. . .)

I do wish my Spanish were good enough to read in the OG. Maybe one day.

Every time I read Balzac I wonder why we read Dickens.

You and Joyce.

That reminds me, I need to read more Balzac. I enjoyed the two I've read: "Cousin Bette" and "Pere Goriot". I've yet to read any Dickens novels. I started "Bleak House" once.

I recently finished Nicholson Baker's "Vox". A pretty fun, smutty and occasionally sexy novel. Of course the concept of a phone sex chat line is very dated, but in some ways it seems ahead of its time - Internet, mainstreaming of porn, yadda yadda.

I finished Franco Moretti, THE BOURGEOIS

then Muriel Spark, THE DRIVER'S SEAT

Flann O'Brien - The Best of Myles

That reminds me, I need to read more Balzac. I enjoyed the two I've read: "Cousin Bette" and "Pere Goriot". I've yet to read any Dickens novels. I started "Bleak House" once.

― o. nate

I'm reading Cousin Pons and laughing almost every page.

i read a little burton, 'anatomy of melancholy'

sometimes his prose really does seem to be like a word dump, every so often he reaches a point where the commas just start piling up and it's as if expressing a whole thought is a distraction

Flann O'Brien - The Best of Myles

― xyzzzz__, Friday, October 21, 2016 2:10 AM (thirteen hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

would like to read that, never read any of the Myles na gCopaleen stuff

katherine dunn - geek love

I just got a copy of that Best Of Myles a couple of weeks back.
Found it in a charity shop and had enjoyed the novels I'd read by him .
Saw a copy of a book of the same title but different cover today and wondered if the contents were the same since I've seen books of the same or similar title with about 4 or 5 different covers

https://es.pinterest.com/pin/257127459952367990/

ooooooooookay...

I've had Blow-Up on my 'get' list for a couple of years now, and I keep finding other things to read. Will need to bite the bullet at some point.

(re-)Reading Jock Colville's diaries (I'm a sucker for 30s-40s British political diaries), and about to start Loque's War Music.

Flower Confidential about commercial production of flowers by Amy Stewart.

Gang leader For A Day is my transport book.

Boutique is my bog book. Think it's by Melanie Fogg.

Sorry, somebody just happened to tell me last night that there was a recent ballet based on "Casa Tomada" (and a few other Cortázar stories as it turned out) which is what those Pinterest photos are about.

The invention of morel might work as a play (I think reading that, and Sylvia ocapmpo is why someone recommended Blow Up to me)

Lorrie Moore's Anagrams. I'm laughing after every other sentence.

There was indeed at least one play of a The Invention of Morel which generated some interesting photos I came across once, let's see if I can find.

No can find, it has gone off the Internet, I'm afraid.

Good to know, regardless!

Judge Dredd: BLOCK MANIA

Anagrams is lovely. Was about to say more, but do not wish to spoiler.

Just finished Wolf hall. Sublime writing. May move on to Bring Out The Bodies since I have that lying around.
May finish off Ford Maddox Ford's March Of Literature since I have that about 200 pages from the end.

you guys, reading... it's just, so swell :')

Robert Bothwell - The Penguin History of Canada
Derek Parfit - Reasons and Persons, part III: "Personal Identity"

you guys, reading... it's just, so swell :')

currently reading:

J.R. Ackerley - We Think The World Of You

just got few a couple dozens pages on my commute but so far so good. I love british novels with bracingly smart narrators, of which this is one

Started reading the Vivienne Westwood autobiography last night when I couldn't drop off to sleep. Had picked it up cos I found it cheap in TKMAxx. Just at a time that I was reading about her in The look by paul Gorman.
just picked up a load of new stuff today too.

But hoping Vivienne might be inspiring in garment making.

The only JR Ackerley I've read is My Father and Myself, which is fantastic. An autobiography that takes in being gay in Edwardian London, fighting in the trenches in WW1, and a central mystery about his father that only comes to light after his death... it's a really compelling read.

His memoir about his dog, My Dog Tulip, is also great: the non-fictional treatment of the experiences he also fictionalised beautifully as We Think the World of You.

I've more than half-finished Caro's LBJ volume 4, The Passage to Power, JFK is dead. The whole gang is headed to DC on Air Force One with the coffin on board. As the most dramatic moment of the story, the day of the assassination and Caro's accompanying observations occupies a very substantial number of pages. 100 or so? I haven't counted them. Caro does a good job of convincing the reader that LBJ's tasks in the days and months following JFK's murder are nearly impossible to pull off, so that when Johnson manages to pull it off we'll be suitably awestruck.

Does he comment on the Paul Krassner story of what happened when LBJ was left alone with JFK's body.

finished 2000AD: THE APOCALYPSE WAR

Toni Morrison, SONG OF SOLOMON

the dialogue between Ackerley's stand-in and his in-laws is fantastic

Paul Beatty's The Sellout won Man Booker. Anybody here read it?
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/business/media/paul-beatty-wins-man-booker-prize-with-the-sellout.html?_r=0

comment on the Paul Krassner story

nope

The nobel went to a musician, now the UK book prize goes to an American. Does anything make sense anymore? ANYTHING?

Did it make sense before?

I finally finished volume 1 of "The Demons" by Heimito von Doderer, which took ages* and felt like a shapeless first draft of "A Dance To The Music of Time" (or something) set in inter-war Vienna. I am genuinely torn about whether to follow up with vols 2 and 3, it's such a swirl of character and event that6 I found it hard to keep up with and often even a slog. Very little happens in the course of the 470 pages of volume 1, but somehow I want (all of a sudden) to know more about what happens to these people.

*Admittedly, and slightly confusingly, I slipped in a concurrent read of "The Emperor's Tomb" by Joseph Roth which follows a similar milieu at a not-so-different point in history in the same geographical location, albeit to very different ends. A few times I expected character from one to turn up in the other.