The girls are out flaunting their Summer plumage but you're stuck inside, reading. What?

The Labyrinth of Solitude - Octavio Paz.

Quite enjoying it, have never read any of his poetry.

>>> Henry James's 'The Reverberator', a novella about a hack gossip journalist playing hell with the lives of a bunch of Americans in Paris

The REVERBERATOR? For real?

or is it really REVERBARATOR

no, it must be the first one

The doing of the thing, the very reverberating matter of the thing to be done, turned out in all candidness to be the vieux jeu that was, however, one now very considerably expected to learn, not yet concluded or 'in the bag' - pas du tout!

THE REVERBERATOR is the title of the newspaper that the hack works for, non?

am also reading THE REST IS NOISE by Alex Ross and am finding it pretty boring/safe, so far - don't really get the hype

Yes, it's the somewhat unlikely name of the paper, as well as of the book. Fortunately, it's pretty low on sentences like Pinefox's sample!

Just finished Elaine Dundy's 'The Old Man and Me' and have just ventured into 'Summer Will Show' by Silvia Townsend Warner.

The Reverberator is solid minor James. I should reread it.

Just finished Colm Toîbin's lovely new Brooklyn – a respite from Ford Madox Ford's interminable No More Parades.

I did finish Mr. Sammler's Planet. I owed it that much. It ended better than the worst bit, spoken of above, but no better than the average - which was pretty damned average.

The whole novel gave off a strong impression of how much this was written by an old man, who felt an innate kinship with other old men and how they viewed the dwindling stub ends of their lives. Which turned out to be a real weakness, since it reduced every character but the protagonist to an old man's caricature of those younger than himself. Bellow not only stepped into that bear trap, but did so eagerly and by design.

Now I am reading randomly in a book of essays by Graham Greene, until I settle on a real book.

I can't get through those "mid period" Bellow novels (I also include Henderson the Rain King). I'm rereading Herzog at the moment.

Anonymity by John Mullan.

I'm probably reading some Thackeray next.

"am also reading THE REST IS NOISE by Alex Ross and am finding it pretty boring/safe, so far - don't really get the hype"

Good to know someone doesn't get it, either - haven't got round it myself as I've been pretty suspicious, partly bcz of the ppl hyping it up in the first place (partly bcz of his tastes). Been saying I'll get around it for a year now...

"I'm reading the Wilkins and Kaiser translation, having a general prejudice towards older translations"

For Proust I am going to read Swann's Way in the Lydia Davis Translation, then the next 4-5 parts in the Scott Moncrieff one, returning to the recent Penguin translation for Time Regained.

That is if I happen to make it that far. But I'm backing myself.

Finishing Svevo - not as funny as I was expecting this to be. I'll be starting the final part later.
Doubling this with Duras' North China Lover. Can't say I've liked all of the fiction I've read from her, but when she rehashes what seemed to have been a hard childhood and intersects with her first love affair its nothing less than a furious page turner. Love the bits where she digresses from the scene in the book to the way it might look like in a film, should it be filmed. She should talk about film in her books a lot more.

all right, I need to spend some time on the books board and actually do more reading, and try to help my attention span which has narrowed to about 20 minutes.

currently: Catharine Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain? ("Not to replicate the caricature of the world, this is what we should do with our brain.") So weird.
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side

Jeremy Lewis: Kindred Spirits - engaging but a bit erratic memoirs of a guy who worked in various editorial/publishing/lit agent jobs in London in the 1970s and 1980s. Funny, self-deprecating stuff.

Eric Ambler: The Dark Frontier - his first novel, a satire of spy/adventure fiction. A physicist suffers a head injury in a car crash, and wakes up thinking he's Conway Carruthers of Department Y, a Bulldog Drummond type who must be an international avenger of justice! Lightweight, but a lot of fun.

I am about to conduct an experiment. In the past I have always brought books with me to read in the evenings on multi-day hikes. When I start my next four-day hike I will not bring a book, but instead I will bring an MP3 player onto which I have loaded two audio books. Two, because if I don't like the first, I can jump to the second and still be covered.

Doing it this way will save me an average of about 6 to 8 oz over regular paperbacks. When you have to lug every ounce up and down mountainsides, lighter = better. Always.

The books I am bringing are The Good Rat by Jim Breslin and Uncommon Carriers by John MacPhee.

I shall make a full report next week.

Are the UNABRIDGED? This is important, though perhaps only to fools like me.

Stopped reading central European gloom because I went on holiday (but did read a bit of Kleist: didn't really get on with him before, but enjoyed 'Michael Kohlhaas' as much as anything I've read in ages. Maybe it's the different translation this time around - Constantine rather than that Penguin Classics one)

It was a trip to Italy, so I haphazardly read about the Renaissance instead. Chunk of Vasari, last stretch of Gibbon, JR Hale's Civilisation of the Renaissance in Europe, Frances Yates, & Goethe's Italian Journey (likeable, this). Giant good fun: enjoyed throwing myself against something and trying to figure it out and seeing it at the same time.

Fell sick shortly after return, hid in bed and read The Stars My Destination and Flow My Tears, The Policeman said.

Currently working on Slavoj Zizek's Enjoy Your Symptom!, which attempts to illustrate major principles of Lacanian psychoanalysis using examples from film (lots of Hitchcock so far). It's slow going, not least because I keep having to stop to track down movies I've never seen (yesterday it was Rossellini's Germany, Year Zero), but I feel like I'm learning at least a little from it...

finished dhalgren and read some short things: pop. 1280 by jim thompson, homage to catalonia, and guy debord's panegyric. i might see if i can get more than ten paragraphs into the society of the spectacle without my eyes glazing over, now.

I really enjoyed (what I read of) Society of the Spectacle -- had to sort of resign myself to not following everything, since I'm not up on my Marx, but I found the discussion of 'spectacular time' in part VI really interesting.

Pseudodoxica Epidemica by Sir Thomas Browne.

Not a new observation, but there aren't many more enjoyable prose stylists. Wonderful conversational, clarity of thought, light and energetic. Wonderfully motion of lapidary depending thoughts with a cheerful capacity for digression.

Yeah wonderful wonderful. Thomas Browne eat your heart out. That's what comes of posting from your phone.

God, that was such a spastic post. Apologies everyone. The sentiment remains.

Second those sentiments on Browne, tho' maybe it makes him sound a bit more transparent than he is, ie his insane make-it-up-from-Greek-and-Latin vocab is i) A+ prose style entertainment and ii) a bit thorny. But PE's a bit stop-start in that regard, right? Like there are 'quincunciall decussations - wut?' Garden of Cyrussy bits and also fairly pleasant rambles around eg plant names.

He is so awesome. I'm going to go and read some right now.

(but did read a bit of Kleist: didn't really get on with him before, but enjoyed 'Michael Kohlhaas' as much as anything I've read in ages. Maybe it's the different translation this time around - Constantine rather than that Penguin Classics one)

What I really love about that story is how awful things end up happening even though no one is actually invested in having them happen - the nightmare of bureaucracy. He's a very modern writer in that sense, his short stories should get more play.

Goethe's Italian Journey (likeable, this).

I envy you your trip and your reading. Haven't read that Goethe, but his 'Italian Notebooks' (the much shorter raw diaries from which he wrote the Journey) was very enjoyable.

I love the Kleist Penguin translations, but I've never compared them against the others (and can't read German). Barthelme mentioned Kleist a lot in interviews and I think you can really see that he learned a lot about pace from him, particularly "The Marquise of O". Anybody read or seen the plays? I've never been able to make it through Prince Friedrich of Homburg, which is the only one I've ever found in English.

Just finished Leonard Michaels' The Men's Club. It was alright, but nowhere near as good as the short stories. I'm also not really sure why he decided to publish this of all things as a novel. It's novella-length and the structure and time-frame don't strike me as particularly novelistic.

Frances Yates - was it The Art of Memory? so interesting! I've read part of it.. had no idea such a field even existed (mnemonics), nor that it told you anything about theater.

The Yates book was Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, so there's some overlap, but it's a bit more broadly philosophy-theology-magic in the Renaissance, plus biography of Bruno.

On Kleist, yes, I love the pacing: the speed with which things escalate in Kohlhaas, till everything is this huge mess (a favourite of Kafka's I think I read) is fantastic; also love the way it flips into the fortune-telling/locket stuff & so goes folktaley in the middle of this bizarre tale of the Holy Roman Empire shaken because of a horse dispute.

The plays are in the selected writings, which is what I've been reading this time. I haven't read them yet. You also get the essay on the Marionette Theatre in there, which is great. Still don't think I've quite got my head round what an odd figure he is.

I've nearly finished rereading U&I!

I'm not so stunned this time round but still believe it must be a special little book. It makes me wonder why I didn't make a point of reading everything else Baker has ever written, in order. I've had a copy of ROOM TEMPERATURE unread on my shelf for about 7 years. Maybe I'm saving it up for the day I think babies are interesting.

Very little of Room Temp is actually about babies, from memory, if that helps.

I think Room Temp may be the key NB text!

And I thought that before I had a baby!

That's interesting. Why do you think it's the key NB text, ahead of The Mezzanine and U&I?

The Recognitions: although Gaddis doesn't make it easy for you to connect the lines (not that you'd want it any other way) I was expecting to give this up by now.

This is really enjoyable so far, 400 pages in, with one or two moments of 'wow this was written in the 50s, did he have a crystal ball or what?' moments. This is also mixed with a few moments with the book (as well as myself) showing its age.

Also reading 10 pages here and there of Muriel Spark's The Driver's Seat

"Stopped reading central European gloom because I went on holiday"
How about Central European tragic (?) comedy? I scored a cheap copy of The Good Soldier Schweik yesterday. Only read the intro so far.

richard hoggart's the uses of literacy. and alfred bester's the deceivers.

Reading Vanity Fair for the first time ever. 200 pages in, my response is "God, this is a blast!"

I suspect I'll either take on either Sterne's A Sentimental Journey... or Bester's The Demolished Man next.

Memo: In re audio book experiment.

A qualified failure. I listened to the McPhee book for several nights, derived some enjoyment from it, but it was strangely annoying to have the voice I heard not be the voice I supplied in my head.

If my concentration wavered for a moment, I either had to lose a sentence or two (preferred option) or rewind to relisten (too too awkward). With a real book I can just lay it down on my chest until I am ready to start again, or scan back and reread if I realize I wasn't concentrating.

Lastly, it was difficult to choose a stopping place, since I never knew when a chapter, or a paragraph, or even the current sentence would end. All I could do was stab the Stop button somewhat at random.

In the future I will resume printed books. Aw, well.

Richard Stark's The Hunter

Started Through Black Spruce, by Joseph Boyden, this morning. Follow-up to Three Day Road which I liked a couple of years ago.

finished the deceivers. fun, but bester's attitudes viz. sex and race are a bit harder to take when the novel was nominally a product of the 80s rather than the 50s. i just looked at my copy of golem100, that one seems the most out there in terms of diversions from 'prose' of all of them. (starting to wonder about the dismissal of his post-50s work generally, i think.)

finished george orwell's down and out in paris and london. i really want someone to make a film of it.

started celebrated cases of judge dee. what an odd little book it is.

Chester Himes: The Big Gold Dream - my first Himes, well written and atmospheric, but a plot too convoluted for me to entirely follow
Mohan Senapati: Six Acres and a Third - Indian satirical novel
Justin Evans: A Good and Happy Child - ace novel about a lonely boy who becomes demonically possessed. Creepy and well-written.
Percival Everett: I Am Not Sidney Poitier - I love Everett, and this is one of his odder books - a young boy named Not Sidney Poitier by a mad mother is semi-adopted by Ted Turner, goes on Candide-style adventures through USA

hey, tell me more about everett! i read erasure as grist for my undergrad dissertation and it left me curious about what he might have written in a less pissed off mood. also love the idea of 'a history of the african-american people, by strom thrumond, as told to percival everett and james kincaid'; haven't read it yet

I love his stuff (except for 'Glyph', which is about a hyper-intelligent baby and is a satire of postmodernism, a topic I know not enough about to enjoy the jokes).

His non-pissed-off, realist books are probably my favourites: 'Wounded', about a black horse breeder/dealer; 'Watershed', a sort of detective/environmentalist/Native American literary thriller; 'Cutting Lisa', a novel about reasonable, kindly people which ends up with one character performing an illegal and not-agreed-to abortion on another without this seeming at all unrealistic. 'A History...' is very funny, and I suspect I'd have found it even more so if I was American and got all the jokes, but it was still great. His books are much more wide-ranging than anyone else I can think off off-hand, and I've really enjoyed them all, 'Glyph' aside.

thx james. for some reason i thought you were american, don't know why.

my internet connection has been down for two days and i have read a half dozen more mediocre SF novels.

i also found a copy of frank norris's 'mcteague' on the way back from the dentist. i always thought david foster wallace had invented this book. anyway, it's amazingly bad.

ha, finding mcteague on the way back from the dentist is pretty funny!

Post to Aimless:

I 'do' audiobooks a lot, while I'm driving. I have a subscription to download one a month. I think they're great, but your basic point is correct: they are much harder work than real books. As a result, I have worked out a few rules to enhance the experience:
- I need to concentrate, so it only really works on motorways or roads I know well. I didn't realise how much more difficult city driving is until I tried it while appreciating the subtexts of White Noise.
- stick to fiction. Understanding how a narrative works does a lot of the work for you. Non-fiction can be very bitty and, like you say, you only have to zone out for a moment and the thread is lost.
- avoid experimental fiction for the same reason.
- simplicity is good. A few characters are better than a host. I tried a biography of Oppenheimer, with a cast of hundreds, and without the facility of skipping back a few pages to refresh who someone is it just doesn't work.
- narrators are important. A comfortable voice really helps. A skilled actor giving different voices to each character is a useful signpost, but more importantly turns the experience into an intimate, real pleasure. Revolutionary Road was outstanding. Beloved, read by Toni Morrison herself, was turgid.
- a straight first-person narration probably works best of all. Netherland enhanced the voice to I felt quite a remarkable level.

Perhaps the best use of all is to get a new perspective on a book you've read before. I finished American Pastoral yesterday, which ticks most of the boxes above, and the experience was every bit as intense and dreadful as reading the original.

Thanks for the tips.

I am leaving tomorrow for two weeks of backcountry trekking. The books I am taking are Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions to read on a five day hike, and Henry James's Spoils of Poynton to read on a seven day hike. The first book is 5 1/2 oz., while the second is 4 oz. - an important consideration for this kind of reading.

I started listening to audiobooks via genre fiction (figuring, perhaps a bit snobbishly, that books in this area would be more centered on plot than style, and as such less prone to sounding "wrong" when read out loud by someone else); have had very good experiences in fantasy and (to a lesser degree) sci-fi. The Audible books of the A Song Of Ice & Fire series are superb - nothing beats a few hours of playing Civ while listening to Lannister exploits. Crime fiction works less well - very hard for voice actors not to fall into total 40's noir caricatures.

I have a friend who enjoyed the Obama autobio, read by same.