Sumer Is Icumen In 2015, What Are You Reading Now?

with a nod to Lord Summerisle himself, the late Christopher Lee. Couldn't wait for the bonfires so starting the thread now.

i'm still reading Space Platform by Murray Leinster. which is not a great book.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/ef/0f/5b/ef0f5bcfae26e40951c00b52a442e6e0.jpg

Is that a novel? Never heard of it

A courtesy link to the previous WAYR thread (Spring 2015). btw, thanks, JRatB.

And thank you, Aimless, as well as other the other ILB regulars who keep me coming back here for interesting and insightful discussions of books I would read if I had the time to.

it is a novel. i'm afraid i don't have a lot of insightful things to say about it though. i'm only halfway through though, so, who knows...

xp

Yes, ILB has a marvelous collection of book lovers. Who needs the NYT Review of Books when we have I Love Books as a lamp unto our feet.

i reread the great gatsby (will reread actually, about a chapter left)

it has been many years. i don't remember understanding it, although i read it several times in my early twenties so i must have understood something about something besides 'ooh pretties'

And thanks to James Morrison for recommending Leaving Orbit, by Margaret Dean, which I just rapidly perused. I am a sucker for anything involving the VAB, although I gave up pretty quickly on Rocket Men, by Craig Nelson, I think, when I read how many hundreds of howlers of basic scientific and engineering were in there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtXuNUEM3vg

tl;dw Can you please prevent a link to print list?

somehow I mistrust whether bill gates' taste in books would align well with my own

From what I saw of the list it was not terrible- think it was all nonfiction, but nowhere near as good as David Bowie's , whose taste was reasonably close to my own.

Murray Leinster wrote some canonical short stories such as A Logic Named Joe" and "First Contact" and did some other interesting things- think in addition to being an sf and science writer he was also a tinkerer/inventor and perhaps came up with the idea of some early version of Front Projection- but I wouldn't be brave enough to risk the great pain of one of his space novels.

Speaking of the VAB, long considered starting a thread particularly for books about spaceflight but could never think of a what to call it.

I finally finished Houellebecq's Soumission. It's a very Parisian novel, not one I see having much of an audience if it's ever translated into English. The narrator's conversion in the end is hilarious for its shallowness: it's only when he sees other new converts drinking choice booze and having marriages with 15 year old girls arranged by madams that he takes the leap. There are discussions of politics and metaphysics (creationism, really) but they play almost no role in the narrator's move toward Islam. The university president who persuades the narrator to convert in exchange for a choice professorial post is a Nietzschean who was active in his youth in Catholic right wing circles, and seems to see Islam as just another means to his ends: the domination of women and more broadly the assumption of power (maybe these are the same for him). There are only two female characters of note, neither of whom is able to sustain any resistance to the Islamic tide, and both of whom are involved in the plot largely as sexual actors. (There are also several prostitutes.) I suppose the novel plays out its personal drama---an aging professor who just wants to eat and fuck well---as resolvable through submission to Islam, and so religiosity is itself simply a manifestation of the will to power.

That sounds ... rebarbative.

I steer well clear of that guy. There is a wide line between meaningful misanthropy and just being a hater.

Okay, as promised, a new thread for y'all gaze at through an unreflective telescope: DSKY-DSKY Him Sad: Official ILB Thread For The Heroic Age of Manned Spaceflight

I have been wanting to read Senselessness by Castellanos Moya for a good long while now.

i've read this. it's awesome
― flopson, Friday, June 19, 2015 2:02 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Just glanced at this and my inner pedant wants to say the title should be translated as "How Insensitive."

Which of course is not quite right, but that is how it often is with inner pedants.

I finished John K Galbraith's The Affluent Society, which I think holds up rather well for a bit of socioeconomic analysis from the last 1950s. As mentioned previously, Galbraith is a seriously suave polemicist. I don't think there's anyone among the current crop of liberal-leaning econo-bloggers, from Krugman on down, who could could match his casually debonair way with an argument. Just one example: in the afterward (written I believe for the '90s reissue, so not necessarily evidence of uncanny prescience) he mentions his fear that an affluent society will breed philosophical doctrines to justify neglect of the less fortunate, and then casually demolishes in passing a prominent strand of libertarian economic argument: "I pass over the oft-mentioned formulation that the rich have not been working because of too little income and the poor have been idling because of too much." I can't imagine this being put any better.

The Old Testament, King James Version. Just started (The Third Book of the) Kings. . . I look forward to learning many things I never knew about the King Solomon character

Still on Wolf Hall, about 1/3rd of the way through. Pretty great.

Got Ford Maddox Ford's history of literature, can't think of title, to read on the bog. Pretty interesting, hope I finish it this time. Have started it at least once before. Think I'm now at ancient China.

Got at least a chapter or 2 of the history of dance music I've been reading on the bus. Think it's called Turn The Beat Around and I'm on post-punk.

Picked up Baker's The Peregrine at the university library I once again have access to -- after going to student stores, passing over H is for Hawk 'current hardcover' @ 25% off & T.H. White's The Goshawk NYRB reissue prominently placed in "Literature" -- only to buy the Ocampo selected stories that was recommended by a guy I know.

#NYRB #DamnYankees

Two hundred pages into the second volume of the well-named My Struggle.

Also: Mark Strand's Blizzard of One.

A partial list of books I touched & thought about buying: Leve's Autoportrait, the recent Ben Marcus short story collection, several things with Dalkey Archive on the spine that I no longer remember, Michael Leiris - Aurora, Peter Mathiessen - The Snow Leopard, Leonora Carrington - The Hearing Trumpet, & Absalom, Absalom!

Novel 11, Book 18 by Dag Solstad. Before that, The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout. Before that, The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora.

I've recently started H is for Hawk.

Dalkey Archive have published some pretty good books with some truly hideous covers recently.

Just started Dickens: American Notes - very funny so far, though he hasn't even reached America yet

The last five days have made that Dickens book germane.

Juan Jose Saer - Scars. Finishing this and loving it. Guy knows how to describe thrash and has a lot of fun explaining games of bacarat, probably knows most of the readership would be unable to follow so its a greta excuse to churn out some automatic writing.

Kevin Schultz - Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties

study in contrasts shows these two publicity fiends had more in common than anyone might imagine. theory is both attacked traditional liberalism from right and left extremes. some revealing minor details unearthed, not earth shattering but that process sheds new light on overly familiar 1960s ground. definitely benefits from Schultz being in his 40s and an acolyte of neither man. biggest disappointment to me was the abrupt ending - nothing on Mailer's debacle with Jack Henry Abbott nor Buckley's relationship with Reagan in the 80s. that was especially frustrating cause Schultz documents how Buckley regraded Reagan warily - at least privately - in the late 60s. far from revelatory overall but recommended for Rick Pearlstein fans.

Nelson George, The Hippest Trip in America: Soul Train and the Evolution of Culture & Style

Still slowly reading Villette, Rat Bohemia (Sarah Schulman's bracingly unsentimental and witty novel of the AIDS crisis), Sarah Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology, and Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider.

currently reading:

atif mian & amir sufi - house of debt

really good popularization of their research, which was basically playing around with an unprecedentedly rich & enormous US-wide micro data set to investigate the role of household debt in the recession. some great identification tricks too. also if you are ever confused while reading macroeconomists debate the crisis it puts a lot of stuff in perspective. after a terrible, overly theoretical and muddled macro sequence last year this got me juiced up on macro again

next up is david mitchell - ghostwritten

Thanks for the Rat Bohemia rec!

No problem! This is the first thing I've read by Schulman, but I'd like to get around to her polemic against heterosexual AIDS narratives, Stagestruck, passages from which have been going around trans twitter of late.

Just finished Enderby Outside, which probably outstayed its welcome by the end but was very good in parts, and am currently half way through Agata Pyzik's Poor But Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West which is about as relevant to my interests as any book is ever likely to get - encompassing Eastern European politics, Soviet architecture, cold wave, Borowczyk, Żuławski, Einsturzende Neubauten, etc, etc. It's excellent.

Not read her wriitngs (and er probably not going to as I don't have the patience for zero books) but you can watch her despair at the Polish elections (later his year iirc?) on twitter.

Novel 11, Book 18 by Dag Solstad. Before that, The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout. Before that, The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora.

― youn, Wednesday, 24 June 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Reading Dag Solstad next. How are you finding it youn?

Very good. I really enjoyed Shyness and Dignity. I will post a quote on the ILX Quotation Time thread.

That's the one I'm reading next!

weird, i was just looking for 'rat bohemia' the other day (and couldn't find it)

Finishing Shyness and Dignity - somewhat similar to Bernhard, like how it situates those ideas about fiction (that section on novels of the 1920s is pretty much something I'd write v badly in my own novel, except I'd probably include a rant about how the irony in Mann never comes off - in English at least) in a particular time where the thirst for fiction/reading is supposedly dying (this is the late-80s). Overall its a digested modernism that never turned into games (which would be called postmod but I'm not calling it that). Lone man at the gates as the barbarians are about to storm it, excepts he is no weirdo and is married to a beauty - but actually as the plot unfolds it is pretty convincing.

youn - if you pull out a sentence it would be interesting to know which one. V tightly knit together.

Hanging on with both mitts to the Richard Wright Express, via the Modern Library omnibus of Lawd Today Uncle Tom's Children Native Son. Social Realism, I guess, but the sustained multi-dimensional focus, esp. of UTC (so far minus any set pieces etc. of Fine Writing) has me thinking of Dubliners, when it allows me time (mostly between readings) for mere comparison. Bloomsday might be the point of departure for Lawd Today's unified framework for that matter (maybe Dos Passos's radio blasts too). Haven't gotten to Native Son yet, but I'm sensing the build and boot camp, duh.

Library of America, not Modern Library.

I recently re-read Steinbeck's Cannery Row. I first read it as a teenager. It has a few interesting perspectives on living in the world, but mostly seemed like a relic, a corrective to attitudes that have long since been buried in the sands of time and change.

I then read Muriel Spark's Abbess of Crewe. It's great virtue that attracted me was that I needed a very short book, which did not weigh much, because I took it on a wilderness trek. As literature, it was not up to Spark's best. It had only one character of any magnitude and even then her magnitude was not immense.

I am now apparently committed to reading Henry James' The Bostonians, being about a third of the way into it. The characters are all somewhat grotesque and the plot hinges on James' insistence that a particular young woman has an astonishing innocent presence, amounting almost to genius, which charms and attracts all who come in contact with her, but he has not the slightest idea how to show this trait in action, and he falls back on repeatedly assuring the reader that her genius exists, despite the complete lack of evidence for its existence. Weak sauce, Henry, very weak sauce.

Yeah I gave up on The Bostonians after about 1/3 of it. It's the only Henry James I've ever read/tried to read and I feel like I should try a different one.

I read Michael Wood's ALFRED HITCHCOCK: THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. To be honest it was not MW's best work.

Now I read Colm Toibin's ON ELIZABETH BISHOP.

Speculative searches lead towards Musil, maybe it's time.

Naomi Wolf's "Vagina" also suggested.

Werewolf Problem in Central Russia by v. Pelevin

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/4177pt2OTEL._SX339_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

I am reading Jessica Mitford's memoir, Hons and Rebels. It promises to be quite strange and enthralling.

wolf solent for the win!

Wolf In White Van is astonishing.

Using that particular word in partial tribute to ancient, dust-dust-of-far-suns pulp fuel for the narrator, the author, and this reader.

Only one "dust" intended, though.

Wolf of Wall Street is my bus book at the moment. Pretty trashy.

Wolf solent takes the prize! Hadn't heard of it, have not investigated too closely.

after ShariVari mentioned Agata Pyzik's Poor But Sexy I read it and recommend it also; Eastern European politics, communism, gender, film, post-punk; I learned a ton and want to go deeper.

Wolf solent takes the prize! Hadn't heard of it, have not investigated too closely.

Surely you will only get full closure when I've read and reported back. Will try not to keep you all on tenterhooks too long.

Sadly I've given up. Couldn't get behind the odd combination of florid mysticism and the everyday tales of cheerful child-abusing townfolk. Found Wolf an absurd man-child, oblivious to the feelings of others, besotted with a girl half his age before even exchanging a single word with her.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKuJDc-Wmrk

otm

Ian McEwan, SWEET TOOTH (2012)

sadly his weakest book since amsterdam

i'm back to the sci-fi.

https://scontent-ord1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xaf1/v/t1.0-9/11987039_10154213186167137_3409655425967590269_n.jpg?oh=2acaf9bbe0c86e84f082f556341f809a&oe=56788AA1

I finished the Jessica Mitford memoir. It was, as I expected, quite amazing. Her authorial voice has an understated, but wicked, humor and she uses just enough exaggeration to heighten the amusement, but the details of her life were extraordinary without any exaggeration necessary. I would definitely recommend it.

Now I've started into Gore Vidal's Creation, which is different kettle of fish entirely.

between library books so dippin back into Narayan's Malgudi Days

I've only read a couple budrys shorts - how is that, scott?

the cover is quite beautiful, whatever the contents are like

i've only read his short stories as well. this is pretty funny so far. in this book, Pluto is for losers.

i don't think i've ever read any jessica mitford. i know i've never read an american way of death. i would definitely like to read the memoir though. i'm definitely a nancy fan. loved pursuit of love/love in a cold climate so much. in my american way.

The Memoir, american way of death and her essay collection 'Poison Penmanship' are all well worth reading: the memoir's probably the best, as her family and life were so interesting and odd as aimless says

Balzac - The Wild Ass' Skin
Margaret Leech - In the Days of McKinley
Sarah Vowell - Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

little did ms. leech know her book would be rechristened in the days of denali

not sure if SWEET TOOTH is good but it is incredibly readable!

I think it is actually quite interesting and unusual in being such a meta-commentary on the author's own early work. And (less unusual) in inhabiting a genre, with advice from Le Carré. Whatever else about IM, he can produce a page-turner.

quiet at work this week so got through 3 books

Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper I enjoyed a lot and the elements that I didn't really 'get'(etta's journey) were compensated for by the quality of the writing.

Alice and the Fly by James Rice which was p bleak tbh.

Black Moon by Kenneth Calhoun which has a terrific premise (the world succumbs to insomnia and almost everyone can't sleep which leads to madness, hallucinations etc the few who can still sleep must be careful because if caught napping they are subject to attack from the sleepless) The first half is excellently realised but it trails off badly imo.

Anybody read MacDonald Harris? First part seems garrulous, but crtl + F name of Borges or title Herma and gets more interesting, I think
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/books/review/michael-chabon-on-macdonald-harris-novel-herma.html?smid=tw-nytbooks&smtyp=cur&_r=0

this guy lives near me. came into my store with his dog for years and i never knew he was a hugo award-winning SF dude. nice guy. i got the whole trilogy. never read him before.

https://scontent-lga1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpl1/v/t1.0-9/11951202_10154220825757137_3576390174085857652_n.jpg?oh=2eeeb5f6af309725193797adf7cb83dd&oe=5664DE97

I'm only a couple of hundred pages into Creation, but I have the gist of it. Vidal frames the book as the memoir of Zoroaster's grandson in old age, who has been everywhere from Greece to China and met every important philosophical or religious figure of the time. As such it has no actual plot other than his travels, observations and conversations, but it crams in an enormous amount of well-researched history from a very formative period in 'world civilization'.

As is inevitable in historical novels, the speech and habits of thought of all the characters are those of modern people, slightly adapted to the fit the milieu and material of the book. In this case, they are modeled upon wealthy and politically powerful americans and europeans. Luckily, Vidal was both witty and sophisticated and he transferred these traits to his major characters in abundance, so Creation is unfailingly entertaining and occasionally illuminating.

Clarice Lispector: Collected Stories -- this is amazing, but so rich and strange that there's no way i can take on the 650p of it in one go. Might need to break it up, read slabs of it between other books

Reading Willa Cather's My Mortal Enemy for the first time and finished my second reading of The Professor's House. I've said here before that Cather should be revered as much as Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

She's great. I'm sad that the only book by her, besides some short stories, that I haven't yet read is an autobiography she ghost-wrote for the publisher S S McClure.

I'm impressed (most of the way through) with Sarah Gerard's brief first novel, Binary Star. It's lightly plotted and tightly focused on the relationship between the anorexic narrator and her unstable, probably alcoholic boyfriend (the social contexts of eating disorders are sketched out, though the novel never becomes as essayistic as Chris Kraus's Aliens and Anorexia), but Gerard's prose is effective at evoking the claustrophobic experience of hostile, ongoing self-scrutiny.

Speaking of Willa Cather, I'm now reading My Antonia. It's my first Cather. So far it's definitely my kind of thing. I love that story-within-a-story kind of framing device. Jack London often used it as well. The decision to narrate it from the perspective of a young boy seems particularly inspired - helps to create the right amount of distance to what could be rather grim events.

You'll love A Lost Lady and TPH then.

today i started

barry eichengreen - the european economy since 1945

already learned something new: that post-war european growth can't be explained by destruction of capital during ww2: capital was already back at 1937 levels within two years of the end of the war (and at level implied by prewar trend within a few more) scarcely enough to explain 3decades of >4% growth

"Clarice Lispector: Collected Stories -- this is amazing, but so rich and strange that there's no way i can take on the 650p of it in one go"

even one story by her can make me dizzy.

Finished Hope Abandoned by Nadeszha Mandelstam. Incredible writing, under awful circumstances. In one of its last pages she is ruminating on whether the book she is finishing will be destroyed by the censors, but that maybe bcz they'll get a notion that "she fears nothing" the enterprise "will not have been entirely in vain". In his N. Mandelstam obituary Brodsky reported someone tell him that, on reading this book, "she had shat on an entire generation". Very true. Really strikes you how Soviet silent cinema - which is celebrated for its techniques etc. - is totally dumped on as propaganda, and that's that (later on she sais how much she hates Pasolini's The Gospel According to St.Matthew - she might have made an interesting film critic). Her literary judgements are things we are catching up on - singles out Platonov for resisting, and loved her digression on Dostoevsky's Demons, which I read earlier in the summer.

Now reading Sergio Pitol's The Journey - this is awesome, best new writer I've come across this year. The 2nd volume in his (clumsily titled) "Trilogy of Memory", describing his travels around Prague and The Soviet Union in the 80s, but he travels by reading. No distance between the physical and the page. There are always twists, so he says at the beginning how he laments the fact he hasn't written that much about Prague in his diaries at the time. You'd think this will be an intro to Prague and Rilke and Kafka, to a correction of a wrong - but then all you get anyway are a few pages of Prague and Kafka before the Soviet Union comes along anyway and dominates the narrative. Finishing so might say more if I have anything but hanging on for the 3rd and final vol to be published next year.

ok fine i'll read hope abandoned

I finished The Luminaries. As a straightforward mystery it works beautifully, I wasn't so convinved by the astrological structure/themes, but perhaps that's because I mostly ignored them...the story was involving and beautifully done, enough that I didn't really focus on the astrology stuff. Lovely to read fiction set in Hokitika/the West Coast, land of several of my childhood Easter-weekend family holidays. We used to go to a goldrush-themed 'heritage park' called Shantytown which was funny to remember when reading about the gold fields, etc.

New thread: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall 2015 ist. What Are You Reading Now?

Tausenddank

Its that time of year when I find used copies of Penguin Modern European Poets: Zbigniew Herbert, Sandor Weores/Ferenc Juhasz and Vasko Popa

(Note to Londoners - there are quite a few others of this series and Penguin Modern Poets in Any Amount of Books)

Sorry should've been posted in the 'what have you purchased' thread. As it contains such a great tip I will copy across.

Just finished Enderby Outside, which probably outstayed its welcome by the end but was very good in parts, and am currently half way through Agata Pyzik's Poor But Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West which is about as relevant to my interests as any book is ever likely to get - encompassing Eastern European politics, Soviet architecture, cold wave, Borowczyk, Żuławski, Einsturzende Neubauten, etc, etc. It's excellent.

― who epitomises beta better than (ShariVari), Thursday, June 25, 2015 7:25 AM (two years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I just picked this up in an Oxfam like second hand store! This was the only search hit on ilx for it. Stoked!