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

Agree with you on both. I think I only read vol 1 of 'Cat' for that reason.

I need to stop being so obsessive-cumpulsive with this shit: ended up reading the entire thing, and got the straps of my messenger bag ripped from carrying it around. Really downbeat ending, too. :(

I've been thinking for a while about collecting literary examples of morphine hallucination

The words from the opera Dust by Robert Ashley.

Really downbeat ending, too. :( - yeah, I did skip ahead and read that. A bummer.

Finished Notes from Underground - wow. Glad I chose this time of my life to read it - it's kinda like Catcher in the Rye in that I don't think its impact would have been so great had I read it earlier in my life.

Gonna try and finish Jesus' Son now without getting immensely bored

"Shadow in the Wind" by Ruiz Zafon. Derivative, populist tosh with a wafer-thin sprinkling of of postmodernist pretension? I think so, but do I have a tiny - and I do mean tiny - suspicion that I'm being unfair and there's a better book in there than I was able to identify. But the only way to know is to reread it, and I'm no interested enough to do that.

"No Fond Return of Love" Barbara Pym. The sixth of hers I've read and easily the weakest. For diehard fans only.

Still making my way through 2666. Almost made up my mind to abandon it after The Part about Amalfitano, when I was finding the relentless bleakness and overwhelming sense of dread very hard to take. What's kept me reading is the sense that a writer as original and talented as this must have something less banal to say than life's (pointless) shit and then you die, with maybe a few inconsequential scraps of poetry along the way if you're lucky. But I still need convincing.

Started re-reading "The Line of Beauty" and also started "The Little Stanger" by Sarah Waters. The Waters has been abandoned meantime 'cause I'm reading too much simultaneously but it starts very well.

apologies for typos: I do have not do I have; not interested, not no interested.

Am about to finish Light by M. John Harrison, which I was inspired to read after reading the John Clute afterword to Christopher Priest's awesome Inverted World, published by ILB favorite NYRB Publishing. So what should I read next? The sequel, Nova Swing? Virconium? Or another Christopher Priest, either The Extremes or The Prestige? Or the John Wyndham book published by NYRB that Priest wrote the forward for, The Chrysalids?

i read nova swing the other week and wasn't too impressed. heavy lifting from stalker. or mb just from roadside picnic.

i think in viriconium might be pretty good: the two preceding novels are kind of grouchy-minded anti-high-fantasy things of doubtful subtlety, but that one had other dimensions. i think. it's been a while now since i read them.

<img src="http://www.randomhouse.com/crown/devilinthewhitecity/final_images/buildingimage.jpg";>
devil in the white city by erik larson

http://www.randomhouse.com/crown/devilinthewhitecity/final_images/buildingimage.jpg

bah!

I didn't like Light that much. A lot of dazzling effects but at some level it wasn't honest.

i'm still only through 2 parts of '2666' and yeah, i'm not sure i've read a novel with such a sense of dread hanging over the whole proceedings, even during banal scenes. it's the literary equivalent of those shots in 'twin peaks' of empty intersections w/stoplights swinging in the breeze at night.

anybody ever read stories/novels by Ursula Hegi? someone brought a bunch of books in to the store and there were four of hers. looks like my kinda thing. was gonna bring them home. obviously i'm asking cuz i've never read any of her stuff.

You can never go wrong reading 'The Chrysalids'!

I'm finally reading John Ashberry and James Schuyler's 'A Nest of Ninnies', which is basically 200p of listening in on witty conversation, without any real plot to speak of. I'm enjoying it, but it's very light.I notice that the Library of Congress cataloguing categories at the front are 'Suburban life-fiction', 'Middle class-fiction' and 'New York-fiction', which is probably enough on its own to drive some readers into a fury. They may as well have added 'White people-fiction' to complete the effect.

Camilo Jose Cela - The Hive. Fragmented tales from post-war Madrid. Not feeling this, although it could a post-Gaddis comedown.

Gertrude Stein - Paris France. Anyone like her? The syntactical games are ho-hum but most of all I can't say I care for her definitions of how the French are 'civilized' or otherwise.

I tried, xyzzzz__, but I never really got on with her. Always felt Wyndham Lewis summed her up with that comment about the Stein-sausage in was it Time and Western Man?

I think her greatest achievement was probably Ernest Hemingway. I am a philistine tho.

D.H. Lawrence - The Trespasser.

You're no philistine to me but someone with always right instincts, if you don't mind me saying so :-)

I've not read any Hemingway either. However I would like to Janet Malcolm's book on Stein.

stein sausage?

i think the theory behind stein's work is way, way, way more interesting than her actual writing

have you tried Three Lives by Stein. her first book. pretty interesting. and much more straightforward than her later stuff.

She dispatched Paul Bowles to Tangiers, too, and that was a good idea.

I once spent time working for an actress whose speciality was a one-woman show based on the life and writings of Gertrude Stein. I ended up knowing huge swathes of Stein more or less by heart. It was an entertaining show but, being charitable, most of Stein's writing had dated badly.

I like "The Trespasser". Early Lawrence may not be the best Lawrence, but it's perhaps the most purely enjoyable. A lot of undigested Nietzsche though.

I like "The Trespasser". Early Lawrence may not be the best Lawrence, but it's perhaps the most purely enjoyable. A lot of undigested Nietzsche though.

This is probably the Lawrence novel I really enjoyed the most--didn't feel like hard work, the way a lot of his stuff does (not that it's always unrewarding work, it's just that with most of his later stuff he can't bear that you'll not get exactly what he means, so he bashes you over the head with it at great length).

I once spent time working for an actress whose speciality was a one-woman show based on the life and writings of Gertrude Stein.

fantastic. this could be the plot of a (comic) novel!

Reading one entry a day in the Wordsworth Vintage Mystery & Detective Stories omnibus and posting my impressions on twitter (DanielRoffle, if you don't mind sorting through the rest of my posts, which are in portuguese gibberishspeak)

finished notes of a native son. and madame bovary, which i've been reading on and off (mostly off) for a while.

and more from my accumulated box of SF:
james blish, a life for the stars
james blish, midsummer century
james blish, earthman, come home!
thomas m. disch, echo round his bones
ward moore, bring the jubilee
wollheim & carr, eds., world's best science fiction 1965

in the middle of the last of blish's cities in flight books and john boyd's the last starship from earth. and then i will bloody well find something better to do with my time. yes.

Thomas Bernhard - Woodcutters. Another bitter tirade, but the (now old, but no less vital) themes are rendered distinctively, the black humour is winning and the lament over Joanna is truly touching.

Think I'll read Jelinek's Piano teacher next.

read Stefan Zweig's bio of Balzac and flipping through Harold Bloom's Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human which I tend to read once a year...

Death in Spring. It is quite remarkable.

Wow, no accounting for taste. I thought Bloom's Shakespeare tome was one of the worst books I've ever read.

Library had an early copy of Banville's The Infinities, so I grabbed that. I'd just subbed a review of it last week, which made it sound crazy: Bowen-y Big House novel + comic romp + Greek gods knocking about + alt universe science-theology. Sort of, but really it's a John Banville novel. Lots of death, good prose. Enjoying it; will finish quickly, then to Pynchon (getting my copy Friday).

'Death in Spring' looks really interesting. I suddenly realise I've read about six books called 'Death in X' (usually a place), and they've actually all been really good.

i forgot this board existed for a while.

i am trying to read books that have been sitting on my shelf since i was 18 so i just finished:

anne labastille, woodswoman
lars gustafsson, death of a beekeeper
josef m. bauer, as far as my feet will carry me

all very easy. i'm going to read heart of darkness next because i've never been able to get past page 10 :(

i finished mcteague. i did end up reading the second half of it in one sitting, so it does have stuff going for it: i still think it seems like it's deluded it's got a handle on its characters that achieves something more than dickensian grotesqueries

and read a bunch more old SF, obviously. i've had that box of books for ages. in fact "i am trying to read books that have been sitting on my shelf since i was 18" is going on with me a bit. i'm on dead souls. which is great, actually: i love how fucked off the narrator seems to be with the whole practice of narrating a novel.

death in spring does look fantastic.

dead souls is in that pile for me too! thirded re: death in spring. i love the cover, too.

unfortunately, I was a smug pretentious teenager, so the books that have been sitting on my shelf unread since I was 16 are Gravity's Rainbow/Infinite Jest/Underworld/Foucault's Pendulum etc.

Dalton Trumbo: Johnny Got His Gun - bloody hell, this is both really good and really horrible. An American WW1 soldier wakes up in hospital minus all his limbs, his hearing, and his face. It's basically what goes through his head as he lies there (a mix of memories, desperate philosophy, despair, mad plans for escape/suicide).

The Jelinek was absolutely fantastic!

Arthur Schnitzler - Dream Story.

Go Schnitzler--I love him!

Its better than Eyes Wide Shut that's for sure!

"Dalton Trumbo: Johnny Got His Gun - bloody hell, this is both really good and really horrible. An American WW1 soldier wakes up in hospital minus all his limbs, his hearing, and his face. It's basically what goes through his head as he lies there (a mix of memories, desperate philosophy, despair, mad plans for escape/suicide)."

everyone in america has to read this in high school. and then we are forced to listen to the metallica song based on it. it's required.

you should see the movie version, james. it's great. dalton trumbo directed it.

or you can just watch the metallica video that incorporates scenes from the film.

currently in the August queue: Spring Snow, Hadrian the Seventh, and Pale Fire.

Just back from two weeks of intensive hiking. During that time I read Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut and concluded that it was not not of his best, but it would be pretty heady stuff for a 14 year old, or for a somewhat geeky, backward 18 year old. Luckily, I find Vonnegut's company enaging enough that he is readable for that reason alone.

In the interval before and between hikes I read some of Falling Off the Map by Pico Iyer. Pleasant travel type stuff.

I also began and am not entirely finished with The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James. (As short as it is, I do not have much time or energy to devote to reading when I am hiking 10 miles a day - up and down as much as 3000 feet in a day - carrying about 30 pounds on my back every step of the way.)

I am finding it amazing, both for how James lays down multiple layers of nuance in his sentences and for the almost incomprehensible reticences and scruples of the central character, which require such carefully shaded nuances to convey. James is also very good at encapsulating a huge amount of wit into a single well-chosen word. You've got to read him like a hound tracking a fox.

unfortunately, I was a smug pretentious teenager, so the books that have been sitting on my shelf unread since I was 16 are Gravity's Rainbow/Infinite Jest/Underworld/Foucault's Pendulum etc.

haha these are basically the only books i read as a teenager

everyone in america has to read this in high school. and then we are forced to listen to the metallica song based on it. it's required.

you should see the movie version, james. it's great. dalton trumbo directed it.

or you can just watch the metallica video that incorporates scenes from the film.

Thanks--I'll have to seek the film out. Weirdly, I had the vague idea that this was a pretty much forgotten book. Obviously I know what's going on.

And have just finished Nicholas Monsarrat's 'The Cruel Sea', which is fine, mostly stiff-upper-lip, occasionally startlingly gruesome, WW2 adventure. Since I'm expecting a "new" Stefan Zweig in the post any day ('Journey into the Past'), I might just have to read these Hard Case Crime books I've got hanging around to fill in th etime.

Almost finished A Sentimental Education, when i was on holiday I finished Moby Dick and read a book of short stories by de Maupasant.

Also not very interesting book related anecdote, very conventional looking middle-aged woman was sitting next to me on a plane the other day reading "The Piano Teacher", which I was a bit took aback by. Until I noticed the name of the author http://www.amazon.co.uk/Piano-Teacher-Janice-Y-Lee/dp/0007286198

i'd never heard of johnny got his gun so not *everyone* in america had to read it. i think we read "a separate peace" instead of that because we were boring.

finished heart of darkness. it was ok. i am going to read the tin drum next.