Heavens! Look at the Time: What Are You Reading During This Summer of 2017?

the ballad of peckham rye

Finally finished TWITS, and I think the first two thirds are very good and the final third is amazing. So there.

Now I'm reading "Left and Right" by Joseph Roth, and "Darker With The Lights On" by David Hayden, this latter a brand-new (debut) short story collection by someone who is pleasingly happy to talk about being a modernist writer, hooray.

Yeah dow iirc that piece is all we have more of it but the early stuff is not as good.

Good de Beauvoir quote. Her novels didn't leave a mark with me; this is a lot better so far.

I really like that Roth bk xp

xpost I just bought that David Hayden - haven't taken the wrapping off it yet. Look forward to it. Reading a few story collections at the moment, You Are Having A Good time by Amie Barrodale, pretty good, sort of like darker post-internet Cheever.

I've also been started Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett, not sure what I feel about this, Room Little Darker by June Caldwell which I really like in places despite a growing irritation with some of the cliches of modern Irish short story writing, eg twee alliteration, made-up words to fit twee alliteration, etc. Starts to feel a bit forced/performative, especially when you read British reviews delighting in the use of language etc written by people who prob think the falsified language is real or authentic.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (a few pleasing and unexpected similarities with the (superb) Caroline Blackwood book I read just before this)

I had high expectations of WHALITC but found the middle stretch pretty hardgoing for such a short book. Begins and ends well, though.

What did you think of Peckham Rye, Mark?

Don't remember a middle slump but then I did read WHALITC in one go on a plane.

Peckham Rye I remember as being really good, too.

re packham rye: still only 3/4 chapters in currently, chuck

peckham

The Wry Ballad of Chris Packham: would not read.

I wanted to go for a moonlight walk around Peckham Rye Common after reading Ballad, even though my own experience of Peckham told me this might not be the wisest thing to do. Amongst many other things, M. Spark = a great London writer.

And yes, I haven't experienced any middle book slump with the Shirley Jackson, nor found it particularly hard going. I am surprised it hasn't ever been made into film though.

I had the same experience with WHALITC (that took almost as long to type as the actual title). I think it's something to do with Jackson's fierce grip on the narrative - nothing escapes; there's no excess.

Wry/Rye would be a rhotacist's nightmare.

The first thirty pages or so are beautiful - tense, weird, precise - then Charles turns up and sucks the wind out of things. The denouement is pretty compelling but I didn't buy Constance's devotion to Merricat. I dunno. I have a feeling like it's one of those great books I read on the wrong day.

I am pulling up to the final few pages of The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton, and apart from its being focused exclusively on the folkways of the very wealthy, with special emphasis on New York and Paris, it has been reasonably compelling. It is worth noting that, for the purposes of the characters in this book, the world is solely made up of the wealthy and no other kind of existence is imagined. The social climber at the center of the book is cruelly lacerated, but from the perspective of the lowly reader, every last one of them comes off badly.

Kazimierz Brandys: Rondo -- supremely entertaining Polish novel about theatre/WW2 Resistance/fakery/sexual obsession

Finished Rachel Cusk's Transit, it's better than Outline (which I enjoyed). It's still a series of little character studies, but the narrator slowly starts becoming less of a cipher. You get her first name near the end of this one (spoilers!), and I'm pretty sure that's the first time?

I'm currently reading the new Orhan Pamuk, enjoying it but I have no idea where it's going or even what kind of story this is going to turn out to be (which is a good thing I guess).

Also read VanderMeer's Borne, it's fun except for all of the time that Borne is not 'onscreen', which is unfortunately most of the second half of the book. Great final image though.

I am pulling up to the final few pages of The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton, and apart from its being focused exclusively on the folkways of the very wealthy, with special emphasis on New York and Paris, it has been reasonably compelling. It is worth noting that, for the purposes of the characters in this book, the world is solely made up of the wealthy and no other kind of existence is imagined.

You have troubles with novels about wealth? It's not criticism, I'm just curious. That's her milieu, but not her only one: she wrote one of the great American short novels about rural insularity, Summer.

jordan the narrator's first name gets used once in outline, when she gets a phone call. that's it tho. glad to hear transit is good, will add to the ever growing pile

That Mary Roach thing ended up being way too cutesey for my taste, but I still finished it.

Now back to French rural life and Pagnol with Manon Des Sources

Oh that rings a bell, thanks Adam! I wonder if she makes a point of using it once per book. Looking forward to the last one in the trilogy.

Having laid to rest Edith Wharton's book, I took up with a very different novel, To Build a Ship by Don Berry, set on the Oregon coast in 1851, at a time when native americans still outnumbered settlers by about 5 to 1. I chose this because I spent most of the past week camping and hiking just a few miles south of Tillamook Bay, where the story occurs.

Earlier this year I read Trask by the same author, set in 1848 in the same coastal area. He wrote a third novel called Moontrap which forms a sort of trilogy of books about Oregon in those few years of transition, when California was being overrun by ragtag fortune hunters and Oregon received some of the overflow. I own Moontrap and will read it before too many months go by.

read & quite enjoyed john clute's first novel the disinheriting party. more seventies postmodernist grotesquerie than anything to do with sf proper... kind of interested in checking out his other novel now.

now per wahlöö's the lorry.

Ernest Becker - The Denial of Death

Very interested to know what The Lorry is like

Reading BACACAY by Witold Gombrowicz, his first collection of stories, and it's very good and quite mad so far

Was thinking of reading Patrick Modiano, then saw a mention of The Black Notebook---good? Or should I start somewhere else, if at all?

Bacacay was good, but stylistically unlike other Gombrowicz. Wondered if this was the translator, but looking it up I find that, annoyingly, the other Gombrowicz i have read (Ferdydurke, Pornografia) was translated, chinese whispers style, from another translation rather than the original Polish

With Modiano, try Dora Bruder or Honeymoon: if they don't grab you, he is prob not for you. Haven't read Black Notebook.

I have begun reading a novella, Cat's Foot, Brian Doyle. He's a local author who died recently and therefore is enjoying a small local revival. From this and the one other book of his I've read, his main stylistic trope is to craft sentences meant to evoke a childlike directness and simplicity, while maintaining an adult's point of view.

He also incorporates a variety of 'magical realism', which allows him to lard his story with transparent fantasies. I can't say this pleases me, but for those who are susceptible to it, the general effect is to lard the story with dollops of sentimentality, while effectively saying, this is only a fairy tale, so you may ignore your critical facilities and indulge yourself in unearned emotions.

Luckily, it's short, so I'll probably forge on to the end and return it to the library tomorrow.

Very interested to know what The Lorry is like

turns out it is actually one of the wahloos vintage have subsequently republished (retitled a necessary action). quite downbeat portrayal of fifties era artist/drop-out life in a small coastal spanish town/environs and the underlying tensions between locals, visitors and franco-ist officialdom. thought it was very good!

Ah, excellent,I have that in the tbr pile in its new title. Cheers!

I am racing through "Black Teeth and A Brilliant Smile" by Adelle Stripe, a novel based on the life of Andrea Dunbar. I love it. So Yorkshire!

I'm now reading Fishcakes and Courtesans: The Consuming Passions of Ancient Athens. It is about halfway between a scholarly and a popular handling of the subject matter and the author, James Davidson, really knows his stuff. I'm not sure anyone here on ILB gives a hoot about ancient Athens, but I expect to enjoy this.

Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah's Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel. Nicholas Blanford.

Just finished Gavid Grossman's A Horse Walks Into A Bar: it's only 194 pages, but so dense, so action-packed a monologue that I only read for an hour each night at bedtime this past week, with no loss of momentum. The old comic, the expert at long-game set-ups is leading his audience and himself off the trail of zingers, off the rails too, but toward the inside-out hobo jungle of psychodrama, revelation, confession, testimony, what maybe the final bit---meanwhile the audience, incl. the narrator, becomes known by quite the range of reactions, in a rowdy Israeli pitstop one frickin' night: "You wanna clear your head, and this guy gives us Yom Kippur!" Others are like, "No, he's still giving us jokes too," even counting them, a bit shell-shocked, others are drawn into the serious cobweb moonlight, at least for a while. And yet the monologist (who has to react to all this, of course) doesn't try to explain *every* fucking thing, the author doesn't try to spoonfeed us: revelation leads to room for speculation.
Even more interesting to read so soon after In Search of Lost Time.

Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

I'm reading Aciman's latest, Enigma Variations. It's worth checking out if you like Call Me By Your Name. This one starts in Italy and moves to New York City, and follows one male character through a number of romances (with men and women) that feel like little Rohmer stories with a Proustian interest in lingering more on how a relationship might turn out than the actualities. I like his writing, but I wouldn't want to hang out with his characters for long.

xpost Jeez, that looks good: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/books/review/DErasmo.t.html?mcubz=0 Think you mentioned getting The Gallery? What did you think of that? Still need to check it out.

Query to the Doctor, but any other responses to The Gallery are welcome.

Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

What'd you think? I adored it.

Jeez, that looks good

yeah, it is, I've read it twice now and love it. The movie version looks good also.

i'm only 40 pp in

lots of interior monologue, which is intriguing as it's an imminent awards-friendly movie

read The Gallery a couple years ago, excellent

I'm going to Iceland next month. I've only read a bit of Sjon - what should I read? Fancy a bit of fiction, and something social history/anthropological/travel-related if such a thing exists.

Andre Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

What'd you think? I adored it.

― the general theme of STUFF (cryptosicko), F

I'm reading it too; I'm halfway done. The narrator's monomania distracts me.

I can say definitively that Armie Hammer is alarmingly well cast as Oliver: the hauteur, looks, frigidity.

The narrator's monomania distracts me.

Do you remember 17-year-olds?

iirc. lord sotosyn teaches students who are slightly older than17, but not by much.

Aciman writes 28-year-olds exactly the same way.

I don't read my student's monologues, Morbsy.

I'm enjoying it. Apparently the film kept the peach scene.