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

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.

Finished A Sentimental Education. Wow. What a book! Flaubert is yoga flame for all time.

Reading The Rebel by Camus.

I'm discovering that i love French literature so much that it's making me want to take classes so I can read this stuff in the original.

haha yeah me too. has anyone else here ever done anything like that -- learned russian to read tolstoy, or whatever?

I took Spanish in university in part to be able to talk to my Spanish speaking relatives, but probably more to be able to read Latin American Boom writers in the original.

Just yesterday I was reading an essay by Helene Cixous in a bookshop -- about Joyce and Clarice Lispector...wishing I could regain my Portuguese.

Finished: Sartre's Nausea. So he wasn't that keen on writing a novel, but maybe, unlike Robbe-Grillet, he wasn't able to come up with a (de)construction that could appeal. Its kinda clunky, and the philosophy could've been cut and compressed and enhanced in a more personal way. I kept thinking that Mishima, in Sun and Steel, managed to do something that was just like this.

Now: Ayi Kwei Armah's The Bautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Much better evocation of ennui (Sartre is mentioned at the back), this time the sense of disgust registers when detailing Ghanaian corruption.

Probably move onto Moravia's Contempt next.

'Contempt' is great!

Read the Stefan Zweig, which was predictably ace, and am now reading 'Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste' by Carl Wilson, which is both really funny and really interesting.

a writer at war: vasily grossman with the red army 1941-1945

grossman joins up with the red army as they're fighting the german invasion, stays with them through most of stalingrad, and accompanies them all the way to berlin. the book compiles his notebooks from the time, pieces of reportage or entire columns for newspapers, and makes them flow together with some easy, unobtrusive commentary and background from antony beevor. many of the lengthier passages describe unimaginable horror, but generally the most terrifying quotes are obviously quick scribblings without any context, something like, "a woman has thrown herself on fire from a 3rd story window", full stop. his piece on treblinka is just astonishing; he seems to have interviewed dozens of camp survivors, local peasants, and german POWs to arrive at a full picture of how the entire operation was accomplished, right down to creating a fake "normal" train station at the last stop on the train line. pretty powerful stuff.

I left my Calvino on the roof of my car and then pulled out of my parking space, drove away, and forgot about it until the next day.

:/

'the treblinka hell', that piece in question, was used by the prosecution at the nuremberg trials. xxp

omar little that book sounds fantastic, but i doubt i could bear to read it

hoos: which calvino?

That's one disruption to finishing the book that 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller' is lacking...

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.

― scott seward, Saturday, August 8, 2009 10:48 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark

I did all three of these in a one month period during middle school, although I had been regularly listening to 'One' for some time beforehand

I was in the class that never read that book for some reason, but I saw all the kids in all the other classes carrying them around. A mild form of a parallel universe.

That's one disruption to finishing the book that 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller' is lacking...

Two hundred pages later, Mason & Dixon is excrutiating. I need encouragement.

There's some Pynchon love/hate on this thread so i started gravity's rainbow the other day

gotta say, if you don't like it i don't think there's going to be a point you WON'T find mason/dixon excruciating

That's one disruption to finishing the book that 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveller' is lacking...

A long time ago, my girlfriend bought two books I'd been raving about and took them on a plane flight. One was If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. The other was a copy of John Barth's Chimera that turned out to have the signatures misplaced and a good chunk of the opening missing. I can't remember which order she started them in: either she got to the missing chunk of Chimera, turned to the Calvino, and went "whoah, uncanny," or she got partway in the Calvino, decided to try the Barth instead, and then went "whoah, uncanny."

The Taste For Beauty