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

As has been typical lately, ILB has been so engrossed in its bookish business, we've let another season start without freshening up the WAYR thread. For reference, this thread continues what we started in ILB Gripped the Steps and Other Stories. What Are You Reading Now, Spring 2017.

To repeat myself, I am reading Thomas Merton's memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain, wherein he unloads his overwhelming conviction of sin and makes his confession of faith, after a rather typical, tepid and confused youth of reading D. H. Lawrence, drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes.

I'm reading Back Of Beyond by C.J. Box. I like C.J.

It's about an alcoholic cop trying to solve the murder of his AA sponsor in the wilds of Montana and also Yellowstone.

Terry Pratchett Pyramids
not sure if first 11 pages of this are missing or not, seems to start at a logical point on the 2nd intact page. Library copy that I've had out for months and am only just getting around to reading.
Events in the Assassins guild college.

Memoirs of A Geezer Jah Wobble
think I mainly picked this up because of the P.I.L. connections but am getting interested in his solo stuff, probably should have been already.
he's just been surly on Later and punched Sean Hughes in the canteen at Nevermind the Buzzcocks Had forgotten Hughes was even on there. Was he a team captain before either Bill Bailey, Phil Jupitus or Noel Fielding?

The Philosopher's Stone Peter Marshall
picked this up from a sale years ago. Got about 100 pages into it then started reading something else.
Thought I'd give it another shot.
History of the transforming object, starts with an ancient Chinese tomb being opened and the lady inside still being perfectly preserved. he then looks at similar beliefs across the globe and across history ancient to modern going through alchemy etc etc.
Should be really interesting.

I finished Toibin's House of Names in less than two days. Cold and impressive. It helps that I'd read Mary Renault for the first time a couple weeks ago, and he's influenced by her.

I recently finished Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves. It's both a vivid from-the-trenches perspective on the horrors of WWI and an acute study of human psychology under enormous strain. Highly recommended to fans of All Quiet on the Western Front, Catch 22, and other depictions of military life. The book could have probably ended with the armistice and perhaps been stronger for it, but the remaining pages on Graves's desultory early career and failing first marriage were an interesting slice of postwar life.

Thread title reminds me of https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/514HlUSas-L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

I am reading a book by the lawyer Joseph M. Hassett called THE ULYSSES TRIALS.

It is published by Lilliput Press in Arbour Hill, Dublin. Walking through Dublin in Spring last year I happened down a side street and found this publisher in a little house on a corner. You can see it here. It was remarkable to come across it this way:

http://www.tn2magazine.ie/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/5500495752_e1375efdd8_b.jpg

The Long Goodbye, and Roger Lancelyn Green's kids book about King Arthur. Trying to figure out which Leonard to take on holiday - LaBrava, Glitz, or City Primeval. Is the Go-Between a holiday book, or is it too demanding?

Nah, it's an easy read. Great book for the summer too

Seconded

I also like Colm Toibin: The Blackwater Lightship was excellent.

Started Omar El Akkad's AMERICAN WAR, but bailed. Dreary and over-long. Seems to be an attempt to make Americans understand what the Middle-Eastern experience of civil war/constant bombings/refugee life would be like if it happened to them, but as a non-American who actually has some curiosity about the outside world there wasn't much in this for me

Now on Gordon Lish: COLLECTED FICTIONS -- odd combination of compressed size and weirdly verbose language, but pretty enjoyable

J.L. Austin, HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS. Has something of the brisk amiable cranky mid-century Oxford don vibe of Empson, but to me is actually a bit clearer.

I finished "All My Puny Sorrows", which I thought very good, heartbreaking in parts. In other parts the rather chatty tone chafed with me a little, what with my being used to an icier, more detached tone in some of the Nordic things I read with similarly upsetting themes. That's a criticism of me as reader rather than the book though.

I read Matos's 33 1/3 about "Sign 'O' The Times" as homework ahead of visiting Minneapolis, and I thought it was excellent and illuminating on an LP I don't know well.

Now I am reading "White Tears" by Hari Kunzru which (as of half-way through) takes a theme of music-freakery as cultural appropriation and makes that into a page-turner with what seem to be supernatural overtones, maybe with parallels to the Gillen / McKelvie "Phonogram" comics? I am enjoying it a great deal, in a summer-reading sort of way. It rushes by engagingly without any of the sentences calling attention to themselves by way of being especially good, or ever bad.

Way too much circling the same points about love as jealousy and vice-versa in The Prisoner so far. but then they-he-we cruise the allure just a bit more, once in a while, and it can go like this:

Our car was going quickly down the boulevards and avenues, whose rows of large houses, frozen pink cliffs of sun and cold, recalled to me my visits to Mme. Swann, those afternoons gently illuminated by chrysanthemums as we waited for the lamps to be lit. I had hardly time to notice, being just as cut off by them by the car windows as I would have been behind the curtains of my bedroom, a young fruit-seller, a dairy-girl standing in front of her shop door, lit up by the winter sun, like a heroine whom my desire could involve in the most delicious complications, on the threshold of a novel which I should never read. For I could hardly ask Albertine to stop, and I had already lost sight of the young women, almost before my eyes had time to distinguish their features and caress their youthful freshness in the blood vapour in which they were enveloped. Said Vapour slipping me just enough sustenance to keep going for a while.

Strike by them, sorry.

Works better in context, duh, sorry

aragon - paris peasant
breton - nadja
crevel - babylon

Started on some Franzen essays (!) in FARTHER AWAY last night. The first one, a commencement address called 'Pain Doesn't Kill You', is remarkably bad at times. The passages of sniping at 'how we present ourselves on social media' etc are so oddly unconnected to the real use and experience of social media, and the supposed insight that consumer goods narcissistically want to be loved (and this affects our attitude to love) all seems -- quite wrong, considering how confidently he presents it.

I have always tended to defend Franzen a bit, saying: at least he writes good novels. Maybe he does, or maybe one disagrees - but I think it's true, after all, that the non-fiction can be quite bad.

His nonfiction is all i have read, and thus I will never read his fiction. He is a nitwit.

I ended up enjoying "White Tears" even more than I thought I would, I tore through it with a real sense of dread.

Now I am reading "Melancholy" by Jon Fosse. I have half an idea it's not going to be the very cheeriest, but maybe the chair and the noose on the front cover are misleading.

^ It is quite funny at times!

"Art Sex Music" Cosey Fanni Tutti
Bresson On Bresson
The Order Of Sounds: A Sonorous Archipelago - François J. Bonnet

Just finished Chris Kraus' Torpor which I warmly recommend. I preferred it quite a bit to I Love Dick (which I also liked) and found it both very funny and moving.

Switched gears and started Robert Brenner's Economics of Global Turbulence which advanced a "secular stagnation" view of the last 25-30 years before it gained more widespread recognition (via Larry Summers). Interesting analysis, he marshals a lot of data and offers a compelling comparative view of the boom and "slow declines" of Japan/Germany/the US.

I'm also about to pick up Vila Matas' Bartleby and Co. I may also squeeze in a couple of shorter novels (and maybe the Savage Detectives, too!) before I re-read Swann's Way.

some good stuff on the horizon

http://www.themillions.com/2017/07/anticipated-great-second-half-2017-book-preview.html

I read Outline by Rachel Cusk and enjoyed it. The reviews talk a lot about how the narrator is a cipher, but it seems pretty clear that it's just a good mechanism to connect the short stories and monologues of the people she meets. Will probably read the sequel soon.

I've been reading The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill. Definitely worth the hype. Not done yet, but I'll go out on a limb and say my favorite contemporary novel since Miranda July's The First Bad Man.

Ishmael Reed: Mumbo Jumbo -- very good, though I'm not sure I got more out of the whole 250p than I got from the general effect of the first 50p

Akimitsu Takagi: The Informer -- sort of noirish Japanese novel from 1965, good on friction of liberated post-WW2 Japanese youngsters against those just 5 years older who have WW2 memories and are more repressed, etc

Yr. description of the Takagi reminds me of Oshima's 1960 Cruel Story of Youth, recently on TCM. I enjoyed Mumbo Jumbo too, and still need to check his early The Freelance Pallbearers and Yellowback Radio Broke-Down. Ditto my favorite contemporary novel since Miranda July's The First Bad Man!

I read excerpts (a chapter?) from Mumbo Jumbo for a class once, and it was pretty great. Need to check out the whole thing one of these days.

Cruel Story of Youth looks really good. I have this box of Nikkatsu Noir movies I really should watch the rest of.

reread the english surrealist painter ithell colquhoun's short novel goose of hermogenes (her only piece of fiction as far as i'm aware?) which employs a number of your typical gothic tropes within a framework based on the alchemical process. shares a similar somnambulistic quality & atmosphere of all-pervading menace with some of anna kavan's work.

now starting on leonora carrington's short stories :-D

Yr. description of the Takagi reminds me of Oshima's 1960 Cruel Story of Youth, recently on TCM.

Don't wanna come across as overly sensitive but did the cover of the Masters Of Cinema blu-ray of this have to be a dude straight slapping a woman? Makes me go "actually, maybe not..." every time I pick it up.

I have this box of Nikkatsu Noir movies I really should watch the rest of.

I remember liking A Colt Is My Passport best. The Suzuki one was actually the least interesting!

Sorry for movie talk on the book thread. I'm two thirds through Jean De Florette - it's my jam, a satirical look at the deep French countryside. Particularly enjoyed the description of the socialist mayor who, along with the village's other four atheists, makes a big show out of having his aperitif at the village bar facing the church during Sunday mass.

I am going away for a week for work and I think I am taking:

Emily St John Mandel, STATION ELEVEN

Jorge Luis Borges, LABYRINTHS

Hermann Hesse: Knulp -- can honestly not tell if this book is good or bad, but I seem to be continuing reading it

reading Breaking Point by C.J. Box and it's even better than the C.J. Box book I just read. And that one was really good. Evil E.P.A. agents! Boooooooo!

also one of the grossest things i've read in a while was a scene - i'm gonna tell you the scene because you will never read this book - where this guy is stumbling through the forest with his hands tied and its night and he's dying of dehydration and he stumbles upon what he thinks is a small stream and starts drinking from it and it turns out its the inside of a huge mule deer carcass and he had been drinking rotten blood. EWWWWW!!! stephen king must have read that and smacked his forehead and said why didn't I think of that!?

I finished the Merton book about a week ago and had several thoughts about it to share here. Then I went camping, read 3/4 of another book and have lost the thread of what I would have written about Merton, other than to note that his book did fit well with the officially anti-Communist sentiments of the Church that was a Big Deal in the USA at the time. That probably gave it a bit of a push in its popularity.

The other book, of which I have read about 85%, is a historical novel by Don Berry, a local Oregonian author. It was published in 1960 and is called Trask. The title character was a fur trapper and the other characters are nearly all native Americans. It is set in 1848 on the north Oregon coast, which is very thinly settled by whites, mostly traders and a few ex-trappers like Trask. The natives outnumber them considerably. The California gold rush has not yet loosed its tidal wave of change.

For a book written about native Americans in an era when simple-minded TV westerns had been riding high for almost a decade, it is carefully researched and quite respectful. Like almost any historical novel, it is highly colored, plays up the drama and romance at the expense of realism, and the author is careful to give the reader both heroes and villains. These are not flaws in the novel so much as requirements of the genre. It's a pretty good story so far and it does the basic job of bringing the time and place alive. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in the subject.

Peter Parker's Isherwood bio.

anna kavan: eagle's nest

Time for some Summer genre reading: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles by Kim Newman.

just started reading John Crowley's Little, Big. it's kind of a bumpy read not helped by the fact the text on the page is so tiny

Georges Simenon: Maigret's Memoirs -- which rather startlingly breaks the series formula by having the book written by Maigret in the first person, complaining about all the mistakes, continuity glitches and simplifications of police process by Simenon in all the other books

I didn't read Borges after all - have instead spent whole week reading Charles Townshend's EASTER 1916. Riveting.

Finished The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break. Once you look past the weird conceit played deadpan, it's not so secretly a sympathetic social-realist novel about the downwardly-mobile American male, Southern edition. Highly recommended.

Started The Transformation of the World by Jurgen Osterhammel. Should keep me busy for a while.

Great run this summer. The first two books are detective novels set ca. 1972 Lao, in the Alexander McCall Smith tradition but with sharper humor, more supernatural elements, and heaps of cynicism. The author is a fascinating fellow.

The Coroner's Lunch (Dr. Siri Paiboun, #1), Thirty-Three Teeth (Dr. Siri Paiboun, #2) by (Colin Coterell),
Baba Dunja's Last Love (Alina Brodsky)
Lincoln at the Bardo (Georfe Saunders)
The Sympathesizer (Viet Thanh Nguyen)
Uncle Scrooge Vol. 5 and 6: The Richest Duck in the World and Universal Solvant, (Don Rosa)
KRAZY: George Herriman, a Life in Black and (Michael Tisserand)

Just starting Michael Lewis's The Undoing Project. I needed a non-fiction break, preferably some vaguely popular-science-y stuff, pitched at a middlebrow level. This one looks interesting and Lewis's other books have never let me down, yet.

i bought the herriman bio a few months ago but haven't given it a shot yet. it got pretty solid reviews i think.

i'm working through The Big Book of Science Fiction, edited by the VanderMeers. it has lots of translated stories that aren't well known, but unfortunately most of them aren't great. love the h.g. wells story at the start -- i need to read more of his short works.

The whole health care debacle has made me finish Robert Caro's Means of Ascent after having left it for about a year, and now I've just begun Master of the Senate.

Also, I'm reading Jay Leyda's Kino, on Soviet Cinema, and Maxim Gorky's Mother, because I'm going to write a bit about Mark Donskoy later, who made a lot of films related to Gorky.

I'm 180 pages into the Michael Lewis book and so far it reads like a high-quality, book-length People magazine article. The scientific content could be inscribed on a paper napkin.

The Big Book of SF is very uneven, and incl. some too familiar---trying to balance it for noobs and old hands---but though I'm the latter, there are many I'd never heard of---didn't know WEB DuBoise wrote fiction, much less SF--and his vision goes well with the excellent Wells catastrophic panorama. Some better translations later on.
Aimless, have you read Oakley Hall's Westerns?

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.

I really meant do you remember yerself at 17. ;)

xpost

If that's the case, between this and Toni Erdmann, we have an interesting little cinematic trend going on here.

I've been reading Dennis Lim's elegant and insightful David Lynch: The Man from Another Place, Christina Sharpe's In the Wake, a series of essays on antiblackness that examines the wake, the ship, the hold, and the weather as figures for the Middle Passage and the structures of white supremacy, and Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian's capacious anthology of writing from the New Narrative movement, Writers Who Love Too Much, which works both as an overview of the major US and Canadian experimental prose writers of the 1980s and early '90s and as a welcome redress to the obscurity of many of the less prolific writers from New Narrative circles, something like a Bay Area counterpart to Brandon Stosuy's Down is Down, But So is Up.

*("an overview of most of the US and Canadian experimental prose writers of the '80s and early '90s whom I actively find interesting, apart from Delany, Wallace, Wojnarowicz, and Anne Carson" might be more accurate, though)

Chinaski I was very pleased I'd read some sagas when I went, Njal's is a good one, I really like Laxdaela and Gisli's also. "Independent People" by Halldor Laxness is a must IMO.

More Nordic bizniss inc all the Icelandic bits that come to my mind here on the bus here: Scando Lit: search

Including all the above, sorry.

Cheers, Tim - that's fantastic.

Was thinking I might be approaching my fill of fiction (for a while), when Ashbery died and some surprisingly (given prev. lazy skimming/stoned staring of yore) engaging, refeshing JA poems appeared on Twitter---which of his books should I get? (Maybe not Three Poems for now, that's the one I was staring at back in the 70s.)

Start with Houseboat Days.

Yeah, Houseboat Days, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Rivers and Mountains, and The Double Dream of Spring are probably the most compelling books to start with.

Will get, thanks! Now I'm wondering about Frank O'Hara.

Start with Lunch Poems!

A Wave too. He repeats himself something fierce, though, so his collections tend to bore me after a while -- as I learned this week when I checked Can You Hear, Bird? out of the library. You can start anywhere!

Turn a leaf: Fall 2017 Happy Families Are Alike. What Are You Reading Now?