A Model TrILBY; or, What Are You Reading Now, Winter 2016/17

Two others i remember with great fondness:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Harpole_Report
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harpole_%26_Foxberrow_General_Publishers

Good to hear the other Carrs are worth investigating.

I'm planning on re-reading all of Fitzgerald's novels soon before reading that biography, I flew threw the eight of them first time round, looking forward to taking my time with them this time and really trying to figure out what it was I loved about them. I'll also be reading the Golden Child for the first time, which I'm sure will be a bit of fun even if its not as good as the others.

Kazantzakis is an author with very idiosyncratic obsessions. In the west, we're more used to authors who struggle with and against the doctrines and traditions of the Catholic church, rather than the Greek Orthodox. This makes him feel exotic.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless)

Can you point out some of the ways he shows this in his work? I don't think I know enough about the differences between Greek Orthodoxy and 'regular' Roman Catholicism to be able to spot this.
Although I suspect The Last Temptation might not be the best book for examples since it's probably more about Judaism vs Christianity.

recs upthread for the Buss unabridged translation of The Count of Monte Cristo very much otm

finished crime&punishment last night + started Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers. next fiction i have lined up is Zola's The Beast Within; I tried reading the first volume of the Rougans series a few years ago but found it dull. i think this one will make nice symmetry w/ c&p.

That Zola is very good

Ive read all of Carr, and enjoyed it immensely, but A Month is probably the best of his books.

― I hear from this arsehole again, he's going in the river (James Morrison), Saturday, January 21, 2017 8:34 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

pvmic ;)

Reading "Mathilda". Kinda lol how Dahl spends the first few pages shouting about how parents think too much of their children, complete with fantasies of insulting the children in school reports, only to then go "what's even worse is when they DON'T value their children", presumably what the whole book is about.

Not sure if these pvmic posts are friendly or not...

just started Martin Felipe Castagnet: Bodies of Summer -- Argentinean SF about minds being uploaded to the cloud and then doenloaded into new bodies, where the poor are stuck with unhealthy host bodies and culture shock from the long periods of time that pass before they are reincorporated

Lee Child, Night School

Compared to the last few entries in the Jack Reacher series, this is an improvement, effectively suspenseful for much of its length, not too badly derailed by a few especially gratuitous fights and sex scenes. As usual, the plot starts to sputter near the end, but not too many pages from the end; it's twistier than I expected.

I think Child exhausted his interest in flyover country several books back, so setting this one in Germany helps, as does turning the clock back to 1997 when Reacher is still in the Army and can get into trouble under orders rather than as a wandering hobo do-gooder.

Tried a Lee Child once, my family raves about him. Liked the oddly congenial tone, but so much padding and repetition!

still reading Bruce Springsteen. He has finished THE RIVER.

I'm not a big fan of audiobooks, but I noticed that Springsteen does the narration of his own autobiography. Not sure if it also has music, but it might be worth checking out.

In love with these times Roger Shepherd's Flying Nun memoir.
. I need to pick up some of this label's material that I stilk don't have.
Probably more as I go through the book.
Got it as a 2 for £5 in Fopp over Xmas. Nice surprise since it's pretty recent.

I have a few friends who like Lee Child, but I can't get past the wish-fulfilment writing style - I never lose the image of Child, sitting at a desk, thinking "Well, what's my tough guy getting up to today?". It all seems writery and fails the disbelief-suspension test. Compared to Michael Connolly, who's no great stylist either, but seems comfortably invisible.

Child is all about forward movement punctuated with moments of nastiness, comedy, or badassery. I imagine him at his desk trying to see how fast he can get to the next punchline or plot twist. In at least one interview he's implied that his first draft is what goes to the publisher. When he's rolling well, his style makes for a fun ride, after which the reader may notice that the story made no sense at all. The way Child hypes and sells his absurdities is part of the fun, except when his energy flags and the action becomes rote and mechanical. Not surprisingly this has happened more often as he's added book after book to the series.

Connelly is under-rated, I think, maybe because his style is so direct and workmanlike, but his plots are usually much better constructed and more plausible than anything Child comes up with. His background in journalism comes through in the realism of the places and situations he presents and his evenness of tone. He too has weak books in his catalog, but his overall standard is higher than Child's.

Yeah, I like Connolly a lot, and did a mini-Bosch tour of downtown LA once.

I used to read them every year, till he put out a few bum books in a row (Reversal, Gods of Guilt and Black Box, I think).

Is there a Lee Child that's like a "read this and you won't need to read the rest" or (I suppose) "read this and you'll *want* to read the rest"?

speaking of thrillers who likes Harlan Coben? i started reading "Fool Me Twice" and it was OK - but i lost it and haven't bothered replacing it to see how it ends

I'd say the first Lee Child, The Killing Floor, is the best entry point and also a good representation of the whole series. It's a little uncharacteristic in that it's narrated in the first person -- almost all the later books are in third person -- but its strengths and weaknesses are the same. There are some later entries that have creepier, more interesting villains, but I can't remember which ones. The continuity from book to book is minimal so there's not much need to read them in order.

the one i read was 1st person, too: about a suicide bomber on a train, and the CIA training bin laden

Think it's time to read Harry Matthews: Cigarettes

It is, it always is. RIP Harry.

I love "The Evenings", it's right up my street (no plot to speak of, unsettled and somewhat unsympathetic main character in a constricted world) despite the consistent and IMO unnecessary baldy-shaming. I don't really know enough about the historical context but I guess there's a chunk of raging against the post-war Netherlands. Written in the late '40s but the war is barely mentioned, Amsterdam is just carrying on complacent.

Now I'm reading "Thousand Cranes" by Yasunari Kawabata, I loved "Snow Country" and this one's shaping up to be similarly brief, lovely and heartbreaking.

the reacher books get weaker later on. i think those guys get a little burnt out on writing them. the last one i really liked had all the stuff about his mom and being a little kid overseas. can't remember the title. i've really enjoyed the sandford books i've read but it's the same with him. the last davenport book and the last virgil flowers book were his weakest. this is when people start getting a co-author.

but i would say the first, uh, dozen reacher books are fun! (i can't even remember how many i've read.)

it's their own fault though. they don't have to write so many...

i'm reading Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker. from 1944. WWII actually starts in the middle of the book, so, she was timely. i'm enjoying it. you'll probably never read it. montana wheat country in the 40's not a very sexy sell these days. i could see it being read in a women's studies class though. it has a great struggling young heroine.

Started Middlemarch, see you in either three months next week when I decide to read Goldfinger instead

"Thousand Cranes" predictably* lovely, crystalline and sad.

Now I'm reading another brief volume: "Helping Verbs of the Heart" by Peter Esterhazy, a (so-far) plainly-told tale of the death of his mother interspersed with capitalised blasts of literary quotation I think. It seems good.

I'm piling through some short things as a run-up to the second volume of Doderer's "The Demons", which will no doubt dominate February.

*not in a bad way, though I get the feeling repeated readings might bring rewards.

walden, again

james gleick - time travel: a history

Middlemarch is beautiful.

Any Jhumpa Lahiri fans here? I'm wondering where to start.

I just watched a fascinating interview with her which made me suspect that I may have underestimated her based on her books covers (there's actually a section where she talks about the disconnect between the covers that publishers choose for her books and how she feels they should be presented).

She's very interesting talking about Italian writers and the differences between various literary cultures.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQkK8ThNsOY

Same here. I haven't read any of her books but, er, I've always thought The Namesake was a very underrated movie, and keep meaning to try.

She actually wrote a very good short book about book cover design and the experiences of being a writer with an obvious ethnicity, and how that affects the way your books are marketed. Only bad bit is it had no illustrations so you could never see what she was praising or damning.

The Clothing of Books.

She was talking about that a lot during the interview, I must have a look for it, its interesting how books are marketed in different countries, there are some huge differences.

The Lowland's opening certainly held my (sometimes leaky) attention in The New Yorker, and it was short-listed for Man Booker and National Book Award.

I liked her first book of short stories--The Interpreter of Maladies?? Can't remember much about it other than it was good. Meant to read more by her, but never got round to it, the book on covers aside.

Read Jesús Carrasco's Out in the Open yesterday in one sitting. A bleak story about a boy who runs away from home and the old goat herd he joins up with. Desolate landscapes, scorched earth, ruins and ghost towns. A cross between Malot's Sans famille and McCarthy's The Road. Hardly any dialogue, great visuals. An excellent book for a hot summer day.

Ok, i'm having that

Jonathan Coe, THE ACCIDENTAL WOMAN -- reread this, very fast. Slight, quick, wilfully callous in a 'young man's first book' way.

Jonathan Coe, A TOUCH OF LOVE -- again very quick (Coe's career started with rather slight works) -- more formal ingenuity, less callous, some of the familiar comic routines starting to get going. Tons about the bombing of Libya in 1986, which seems a relatively tame affair now but in the book is seen as an outrage.

I can barely remember Touch of Love, except being disappointed by it - but I do recall a couple of really strong passages about living in London (basically about how shit it is, and how you always wish you were somewhere else) and the sentiment (if not the exact sentences) really stuck with me. Is that the right book?

Penguin History of Modern Russia by Robert Service. Kind of an impulse buy, no idea if it's the right one to go for.

Still reading xpost Bowen's Collected Stories, though after the consistently excellent first thirty-odd, the ones she wrote in her and the century's thirties seem uneven, developing manners, ritualized elements, also, though there are always nuggety bits worth remembering credible and sometimes startling observations and conjectures re psychology, she can also(more than in earlier stories) make flat, harsh statements about some of her thirtysomething female characters...but the stories still grow over and around them, like scar tissue.

The one that keeps coming to mind is from The Twenties (section), "The Back Drawing Room", which starts with a round of fules making philosophical pronouncements, centered by an older(-seeming) lady who may be a theosophist---I don't know much about those---the talk sometimes veers "dangerously closely close to comprehension", which may overly encourage the troublesome little man (a regular is in charge of him for the day, and couldn't find another sitter or something) to volunteer the story of his experience with a real ghost, honest.
This is the only time she's presented an extended story-within-a-story, and though the little man is def not a pro at this sort of thing, his account gradually accrues its own elusive, persistent ghost of meaning. Think this would be true even if, as with certain seemingly mysterious folk songs, I picked up on certain fleeting references the way their early audiences did, the way this story's 1920s readers probably did, the way its characters do. Anyway, b-r-r-r, eh?!, and o shit!

Some of those songs seem like they were coded, satisfying the singers and their early audiences---Ford Madox Ford wrote about getting that impression when he moved to the country, listening to the music of people whose ancestors had adapted to invasions etc.; also it's a way to savor favorite old gossip and (as in this story) other in-crowd satisfactions.

Re: The Evenings https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/01/why-it-took-so-long-to-translate-a-dutch-classic/514604/?utm_source=atltw

John Donovan, I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth The Trip
Jonathan Lethem, They Live
Isabelle Holland, The Man Without a Face
Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story
Kathryn Bond Stockton, The Queer Child or, Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century

I've been dismally slow in my reading lately. Only halfway through The Thirty Years War, but it isn't the author's fault. Wedgewood summarizes and connects the major events and the motives of the major players with admirable clarity, especially given the muddled complexities of the war and large number of players.

After I finish this, I need to roll back into some light weight books for a while.

hugo ball: flight out of time

Frank Harris: The Bomb -- novel about a man getting radicalised, culminating in the Chicago police bombing of the 1880s

that is something i've been interested in checking out since hearing part of an adaptation of it years ago. has it had a recent republication?

I'm rereading Henry Green's Loving, New York Review of Books Edition. What a master.