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

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.

The Bomb ed I've got is a Feral House edition from 2008, still in print; http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0922915377.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

It has an intro by John Dos passos, which begins thus: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C3fFf5zUEAAQsKU.jpg

sorry, big octopus

ah, nice thanks! think it was feral who put out the nicely designed edition of jack black's autobiography that i have.

Chuck Tatum: I don't think that's in A TOUCH OF LOVE which is not set in London at all. More likely THE ACCIDENTAL WOMAN. Also some passages in WHAT A CARVE UP! cover some negative London experiences.

sad trombone: I think Lethem's THEY LIVE is one of his better later books, though it quotes Zizek too much.

I am now reading a third Coe, THE RAIN BEFORE IT FALLS - remarkable for being, so far, totally non-comic.

I am now deep into volume two of "The Demons" by von Doderer. It's shapeless, confusing and way too long, and I'm enjoying every page.

:D

Fred Reid - Keir Hardie: the making of a socialist

Flann O'Brien, 'Thirst'

Followed my own advice upthread and started listening to Springsteen's autobiography. 2 or 3 chapters every day, while doing the dishes. It would have been nice if he spoke a little more conversational, like "uncle Bruce tellin' stories".
But the prose doesn't really lend itself to that style of narration, and while his voice is quite monotonous, the book itself is great and he is a good writer.

Finished xpost The Thirties (mid-section of Elizabeth Bowen's Collected Stories and thought most of it was pretty good after all, despite/along with some some wear and tear, hers as well as the characters' (in her and often their and def. the century's thirties, yeah). This part is less about (self-described) winners and losers in social clashes---still a lot of conflict and barriers between man and wife, adults and children, siblings, friends, neighbors----but more about the aftermath, incl. of outright violence occasionally, and the takeaway from all that, in terms of new sense of self, or lack thereof, the cost of either. She seems older. but tougher in some ways.

If sometimes a bit of a schoolma'arm in this section (with black stockings though, mmmm)

Finished the Mark Kermode book I started before Xmas this morning since it was lying around the bed. It was called teh Hatchet Job.
May read some more by him if i get the chance. But do have several other things on the go too

Roger Shepher'd In Love With These TImes

read teh first couple of chapters of Simon Rerynolds' Shock & awe so want to get through that.

couple of Horrible Histories that I picked up from the 25c section of a charity shop.

a few other bits and pieces that I need to finish.
including Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia

reading 'summer house w swimming pool' by herman Koch ~ not sure im enjoying this, or where its going, but a breezy read

also swamplandia by Karen Russell - this seems really good, digging it

& the Richard yates biography

ilx is good cuz apparently I read this^ already 7 yrs ago ~o-o~

ive been reading 'a tragic honesty', it's really good.

― johnny crunch, Saturday, February 27, 2010 7:51 PM (six years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Finished Quixote last night. Nothing less than the best that we can be.

Now onto a set of spiralling sentences by Claire Louise-Bennett - Pond

Dennis Marks: Wandering Jew - The Search of Joseph Roth

Entertaining short travel/biography book, trying to unpick the various lies and elaborations included in Roth's many life stories

search FOR, that should say

The Broom of the System - David Foster Wallace
this is super fun and pulpy, really wish he wrote more stuff like this- he basically disowned it after IJ.

psyched to get John Darnielle's new book Universal Harvester on Tuesday.

Pretty far into the life-during-wartime stories (incl. late entries in The Thirties, mostly in The War Years) of the xpost Bowen doorstop: some few homefront characters are brought to crisis by having the longtime shields of convention dissolved(and one is so traumatized she falls back and forth from a bed full of ceiling plaster to a complex pastorale, through time and space and identity, kind of pre-channeling early 70s Lessing), but most adapt by getting deep into new habits, goals, jobs, tunneling from aspect A to G etc, and/or spinning sometimes skimming through diffuse details of rationing, paperwork, detours, evacuations, skirting and blurting but keep moving---"I've been outside of London once or twice; the countryside is very full"---friendly yet not quite to friends who don't quite look like themselves, coming back in on govt. business, having left us for the country---"I have no more home---" "Oh yes, Belmont Square! How nasty"- but bombing's too tedious to talk about (to explain to somebody who went off to the country)---then there are those who seem reproachful to visitors from London, return of the local boy between generations, who didn't have to leave us like that (and he, caught between generations, is offended and attracted by the rude girl who wants to run away to London and will look him up there, screw the blitz, at least it's not the posh sticks). For instance.
Any other fiction about life in the WWII UK that I should check out, written in the same period or not too much later? Prefer something that seems based on personal experience, more than research.

"diffuse details" but the driver never gets lost.

Any other fiction about life in the WWII UK that I should check out, written in the same period or not too much later? Prefer something that seems based on personal experience, more than research.

Henry Green: Caught
Patrick Hamilton: The Slaves of Solitude
Graham Greene: the End of the Affair

Plus some stuff by Julian Maclaren-Ross, though not sure what bits in which books off the top of my head. The relevant bits of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time would also qualify.

The Sword of Honor Trilogy, Evelyn Waugh is worth a look. I can't recall much about his Put Out More Flags from 1942.