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

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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?

xyzzzz__, Thursday, 25 June 2015 09:31 (eight years ago) link

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

youn, Thursday, 25 June 2015 11:01 (eight years ago) link

That's the one I'm reading next!

xyzzzz__, Thursday, 25 June 2015 11:34 (eight years ago) link

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

mookieproof, Thursday, 25 June 2015 23:12 (eight years ago) link

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.

xyzzzz__, Friday, 26 June 2015 20:25 (eight years ago) link

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.

dow, Saturday, 27 June 2015 22:41 (eight years ago) link

Library of America, not Modern Library.

dow, Sunday, 28 June 2015 00:05 (eight years ago) link

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.

Aimless, Sunday, 28 June 2015 03:57 (eight years ago) link

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.

franny glasshole (franny glass), Sunday, 28 June 2015 19:41 (eight years ago) link

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.

the pinefox, Monday, 29 June 2015 09:48 (eight years ago) link

The Bostonians has a strange structure: the first third of the novel covers a day and a night! Once the Olive-Verena quasi-romance starts, the book picks up.

franny glass, I always recommend Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady.

The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 29 June 2015 11:16 (eight years ago) link

It's been a while since I read The Bostonians but IIRC, Verena's innocence and purity is more ambiguous than Aimless allows for, though this possibly doesn't become apparent until quite late in the novel (James also doesn't really make much of an effort to engage with or articulate the feminist politics notionally in play, just as The Princess Casamassima doesn't really engage with radical politics - it's enough to know that these people are 'radicals', or 'feminists', or 'spiritualists' or whatever, and I'm not sure that any more 'evidence' is required than this.) What should be apparent right from this start is that this is James writing in his most ironic mode - it's a cooller version of the comedy of manners already played out in The Europeans - which makes the book's final sentence all the more devastating. This is not really a novel of character.

sʌxihɔːl (Ward Fowler), Monday, 29 June 2015 11:36 (eight years ago) link

there's a strong hint in The Bostonians that Verena manipulates her charm and is no ingenue

The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 29 June 2015 13:11 (eight years ago) link

the portraits of Dr. Prance and Ms. Birdseye are sharp. He was expert at the kinds of portraits you expect from Dickens.

The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 29 June 2015 13:13 (eight years ago) link

Verena's innocence and purity is more ambiguous than Aimless allows for

You may note that I said that she has an "innocent presence", not that she is an innocent. At this point in the novel she is a complete cipher that others continually pour their aspirations into. James gives almost no hints as to what she is thinking, but generally appraises her actions through the lens of one of the other characters or his narrator hedges its description with terms such as 'apparently'. The fact that she has red hair is touched on so lightly and briefly that it makes me wonder whether this is meant as a foreshadowing of a less demure personality than she currently displays.

Aimless, Monday, 29 June 2015 16:05 (eight years ago) link

xyzzzz__, I could go up to the stacks to get it, but I'm wondering if you might want to post something instead as you are reading, which I think is most of the fun -- holding on to it, so to speak.

I checked out The Wild Duck by Ibsen, Correction by Bernhard, and Senselessness by Castellanos Moya and will probably read them in that order. But with Ibsen, I reverted to my own Bantam paperback because I started to get distracted by the marginalia and underlining in the Michael Meyer translation from the library.

youn, Monday, 29 June 2015 16:24 (eight years ago) link

Thanks Alfred, I suspect HJ is really up my alley. I wasn't connecting with The Bostonians, but in large part I just didn't have time to keep up with it, and it was due back at the library so I quit. Life is more conducive to novel-reading lately so I want to give him another try.

franny glasshole (franny glass), Monday, 29 June 2015 17:47 (eight years ago) link

finished rory stewart. between that & the anand gopal, that's enough afghanistan for the immediate future, I think. tobias jones' "the dark heart of italy" next.

hot doug stamper (||||||||), Monday, 29 June 2015 17:49 (eight years ago) link

youn - finished and gave it back to my library the next day. I loved the last few pages, with its writing around decay of beauty. Solstad is not as relentlessly negative as Bernhard - who is doing it as performance, its that v particular voice of his. Correction was my first read by him.

I am reading a collection by Rilke - poems from all periods (tr. Steven Mitchell) which also has excerpts of the more 'poetic' passages of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Not sure what I think of doing so - suppose its as worthwhile a way of coming across that book.

xyzzzz__, Monday, 29 June 2015 21:41 (eight years ago) link

I haven't read much James - tried some of his longer novels & bogged down in them quite quickly - but thought The Turn of the Screw was top-notch.

hardcore dilettante, Monday, 29 June 2015 22:26 (eight years ago) link

I always say start with the early novels first.

The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 29 June 2015 22:31 (eight years ago) link

Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power by Timothy Tyson

I became curious about Williams recently while reading another civil rights-era history. So far I've only read as far as his WW2-era military service:

His contempt for white authority soon earned him a three-month sentence in the stockade for insubordination; at the hearing, Williams said, 'I told them that I was black, and that prison did not scare me because black men are born in prison. All they could do was put me in a smaller prison.'"

Heroic melancholy continues to have a forceful grip on (bernard snowy), Monday, 29 June 2015 23:00 (eight years ago) link

(Sorry for fixing on the obvious pull-quote, even if it had become justly famous)

Heroic melancholy continues to have a forceful grip on (bernard snowy), Monday, 29 June 2015 23:37 (eight years ago) link

Hadot - The Veil of Isis

On three words of Heraclitus usually translated, "Nature loves to hide," which gets interpreted in different ways down through the ages. I'm trying to read in French and relieved to find that this is pretty clear and straightforward.

jmm, Tuesday, 30 June 2015 13:09 (eight years ago) link

keep meaning to read that but

j., Tuesday, 30 June 2015 13:32 (eight years ago) link

I think you would like it. It strikes me as a really cool perspective on the history of philosophy, or a cool choice of aphorism to serve as kernel to build a synoptic history around.

He's adding to my shame at how much I've neglected the ancients. I only read the Symposium for the first time a few weeks ago. Turns out it's really great.

jmm, Wednesday, 1 July 2015 01:37 (eight years ago) link

i've read a lot of him, studied 'what is ancient philosophy?' pretty closely even - just haven't made the time

all of plato is really great! that's why he's plato

j., Wednesday, 1 July 2015 02:17 (eight years ago) link

oh i like hadot
big influence on late foucault (re ancient philosophy as way of life/ care of the self/ askesis)

drash, Wednesday, 1 July 2015 02:35 (eight years ago) link

picked up #2 in the elena ferrante trilogy to read in cape cod next week B-)

flopson, Wednesday, 1 July 2015 02:37 (eight years ago) link

The White Album - Joan Didion. This is fantastic. The alignment of personal psychology and exploration to the geist of the age is exact - tone, insight, humour make reading this feel very direct, very clear-sighted. I loved her observation about the San Francisco State College revolutionary actions:

Perhaps Evelyn Waugh could have gotten it down exactly right: Waugh was good at scenes of industrious self-delusion, scenes of people involved in odd games.

industrious self-delusion - it's a phrase that manages to be illuminating about Waugh, illuminating about her subject, and potentially illuminating for future ages such as ours (in countries like the UK anyway), where that very phrase seems like a characterising and besetting vice.

Enjoyed her piece Holy Water - about the water logistics and politics of the Western States - so much, that I'm going to sit down and watch Chinatown right now. My enjoyment is slightly unexpected (presumably harbouring some filthy unexamined prejudice), but stronger for that.

Fizzles, Thursday, 2 July 2015 21:35 (eight years ago) link

just started the dalkey archive's european fiction 2015 - a collection of short stories. the first two i read at random both had severed penises in them.

i have already abandoned a few due to them being twee magic realism shite, but there was a good one from france about a man who lives in an apartment block sending severed limbs and threatening notes to the residents association.

bureau belfast model (LocalGarda), Thursday, 2 July 2015 21:58 (eight years ago) link

I first thought severed limbs would be sufficient threat, but then again he prob wanted to be precise, which is always helpful, or meant to be. Title, author?

dow, Thursday, 2 July 2015 23:22 (eight years ago) link

Sjon: The Whispering Muse -- Icelandic fish expert/obsessive goes on ride to Turkey on a freighter ship; one of the crew is a former Argonaut (as in the golden fleece Argonauts, not the vintage kids radio show)

as verbose and purple as a Peter Ustinov made of plums (James Morrison), Friday, 3 July 2015 00:46 (eight years ago) link

i got bored of the murray leinster book i was reading so i started reading john le carre's the night manager because i've never read any of his books! but i'm kinda not into that one either. i kept putting it down and then when i picked it up again i forgot everyone's names and who the flashback anecdotes were about. but i've always wanted to read him. i have a bunch of his later hardcovers. i dunno, guess i'm feeling a little uninspired at the moment. (so now i'm finishing the leinster out of a sense of duty...)

scott seward, Friday, 3 July 2015 01:00 (eight years ago) link

such a boring post. sorry. you guys read cool fancy books. i like the idea of having internet friends who read cool fancy books.

scott seward, Friday, 3 July 2015 01:01 (eight years ago) link

With le Carre I'd start with either The Spy Who Came In From the Cold or else Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy -- if they don't do it for you, I'd doubt the others will. And I tend to enjoy them more as novels about amoral office politics where lives hang on the decisions being made, rather than just amounts of toner that gets ordered, instead of as spy novels. Does that make any sense?

as verbose and purple as a Peter Ustinov made of plums (James Morrison), Friday, 3 July 2015 01:11 (eight years ago) link

Thomas King, The Back of the Turtle

The New Gay Sadness (cryptosicko), Friday, 3 July 2015 01:27 (eight years ago) link

I finished everything in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol. 1 and Vol. 2A. Highlights were Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God" and C.L. Moore's "Vintage Season". I read a few from Vol. 2B but I'm taking a break from it.

also read Erik Davis - 33 ⅓: Led Zeppelin IV (2005). Some funny bits from Thomas Friend's crazy book. Didn't care about the journey of "Percy".

currently reading:
2015 Hugo nominees. "The Parliament of Beasts and Birds" may be the worst thing I have ever read.
Thomas Harris - Red Dragon. Because I like the TV show. Low reading grade level -- feels like the only 3-syllable words in the book are "psychopath" and "cannibal".

aaaaablnnn (abanana), Friday, 3 July 2015 01:34 (eight years ago) link

Are those Hugo nominees the right-wing misogynistic illiterate ones?

as verbose and purple as a Peter Ustinov made of plums (James Morrison), Friday, 3 July 2015 02:52 (eight years ago) link

the gap between 'red dragon' and 'silence of the lambs' is really remarkable, bookwise

♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Friday, 3 July 2015 02:59 (eight years ago) link

I've only read the second--is it the better or the worse?

as verbose and purple as a Peter Ustinov made of plums (James Morrison), Friday, 3 July 2015 05:34 (eight years ago) link

xp Right wing and illiterate, yes. Of the ones in the bloc I read, only "Totaled" had female characters, and that one's actually OK.

aaaaablnnn (abanana), Friday, 3 July 2015 06:36 (eight years ago) link

dow - it's by nicolas bouyssi and it's called an unexpected return

could be in another collection of his own but i read it in this: http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/product/best-european-fiction-2015/

bureau belfast model (LocalGarda), Friday, 3 July 2015 09:26 (eight years ago) link

jm i think 'silence' is p close to being a Great Popular Novel, which i think is a difficult thing to do; red dragon is an awkward misfire

♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Monday, 6 July 2015 02:49 (eight years ago) link

Silence is the Harris to start with, for sure. Although the serial killer seemed blurry; can see how Hannibal upstaged him in a lot of reviews, and certainly on screen---but the descriptions from Clarice's point of view have stayed with me more than any other element. When she's examining/contemplating the body of a dead girl, visiting her house (a tall, narrow wooden house near a canal? Or am I putting in a house from somewhere else? The one I picture seems to fit). In her room, reading it like she reads her memories, knowing about that little secret drawer in the valued dime store case, where the snapshots will be. The focus of such scenes and others, with morbidity something to be duly noted, while learning to read and recognize the killer from/in what he's left behind, in his work. Recognizing the kind of girls he chooses, she recognizes the changes he makes. Hannibal edits Clarice with relish, too---not his absolute fave, but he'll take what he can get.
Thinking about Great Novels also as crime fiction, the Dusty I've been trying to catch up with, the restored Native Son I'm reading now.

dow, Monday, 6 July 2015 04:29 (eight years ago) link

Thus Were Their Faces, the NYRB collection of Silvina Ocampo's short stories

Heroic melancholy continues to have a forceful grip on (bernard snowy), Monday, 6 July 2015 10:53 (eight years ago) link

I'm reading 'The Dispossessed' by UKLG which evidently has a bit of a cult following around these parts, but is the first I've read by her. Pretty great so far.

cod latin (dog latin), Monday, 6 July 2015 10:57 (eight years ago) link

It took me half a minute of puzzlement to suss that UKLG was Ursula K. LeGuin.

Aimless, Monday, 6 July 2015 16:34 (eight years ago) link

Lately I've been reading Kelly Link's Stranger Things Happen, Gertrude Stein's Ida, which is charming and puzzling but doesn't capture the uncanniness of American spectacle quite as vividly as Everybody's Autobiography, Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey, which is satisfyingly acerbic about the callousness and hypocrisy of the gentry but seems a little simplistic next to Charlotte's Vilette (though most bildungsromane would), Kim Hyesoon's book of poems Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream, which is by turns melancholy and feral, and William Gibson's The Peripheral, which as of halfway through has some interesting worldbuilding but surprisingly flat prose so far, though I'll reserve judgment on it for now.

one way street, Monday, 6 July 2015 17:14 (eight years ago) link

Thanks, LocalGuardia, I'll check that out (publisher's page is somewhat worrying: Best European Fiction brings new names and new work to an international audience, at a time when the United States and Britain are seeing a dearth of translated texts. Makes me wonder what I'm missing.)
I need to check out Ocampo and Link too.

Intrigued by review of this new collection:
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/mapping-the-wander-lines-the-quiet-revelations-of-fernand-deligny
Beginning in the 1950s, Deligny conducted a series of collectively run residential programs — he called them “attempts” (or tentatives, in French) — for children and adolescents with autism and other disabilities who would have otherwise spent their lives institutionalized in state-run psychiatric asylums. After settling outside of Monoblet in the shadow of the Cévennes Mountains in southern France, Deligny and his collaborators developed novel methods for living and working with young people determined to be “outside of speech” (hors de parole).

Militantly opposed to institutions of every kind — he occasionally referred to his small group as living like a band of nonlethal guerillas — Deligny was critical of the dominant psychiatric, psychoanalytic, and positivist educational doctrines of the time. He rejected the view that autism and cognitive disability were pathological deviations from a preexisting norm. He did not try to force the mostly nonspeaking autistics who came to live with them to conform to standards of speech. Instead, Deligny and his collaborators were “in search of a mode of being that allowed them to exist even if that meant changing our own mode.” They sought to develop “a practice that would exclude from the outset interpretations referring to some code” — anticipating, by several decades, some of the central tenets of the neurodiversity and autistic self-advocacy movements: “We did not take the children’s ways of being as scrambled, coded messages addressed to us.”
(He traced the paths of autistic youths in daily treks, which influenced his ideas about the development of language, in his own writing and in history (staying away from neurobiology), and the physical movements behind language, thence to working with Truffault and Marker, for inst., as well as making his own films, now on DVD.)
Like a spider’s web, a network is always in formation for Deligny, always in the midst of being built and maintained in compositional responsiveness to its environment. It is a precarious enterprise, in perpetual danger of either falling apart or, alternatively, rigidifying into an institution. (It is not surprising, given all of this, that Deligny was an important influence on Deleuze and Guattari’s later elaboration of the rhizome.)
Sorry, this too, since it's ILB after all:
His writerly voice is hard to locate genre-wise, skirting between philosophy and poetry, anthropological observation and quasi-prophetic (if emphatically secular) aphorism. Deligny seems to have approached the practice of writing with the same spirit of open-ended, improvisatory experimentation that characterized his various attempts at radically anti-institutional communal living...
Yet patient readers will find this book shimmering with quiet revelations. In place of orderly, coherent interpretive systems, Deligny attunes his reader to the lower frequencies of a life lived on the margins. His essays evoke the austere desert terrain of the Cévennes Mountains where he and his collaborators spent much of their time living in relative isolation; his deeply impressionistic writing surveys this landscape for its minor stirrings, and strives to imagine new arrangements of common life.

Not a s spoiler, there's lots more.

dow, Monday, 6 July 2015 21:36 (eight years ago) link

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

flopson, Tuesday, 22 September 2015 02:34 (eight years ago) link

"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.

scott seward, Tuesday, 22 September 2015 03:11 (eight years ago) link

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.

xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 22 September 2015 21:48 (eight years ago) link

ok fine i'll read hope abandoned

♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Wednesday, 23 September 2015 00:44 (eight years ago) link

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.

franny glasshole (franny glass), Wednesday, 23 September 2015 01:07 (eight years ago) link

Tausenddank

Aimless, Wednesday, 23 September 2015 03:02 (eight years ago) link

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)

xyzzzz__, Friday, 25 September 2015 22:22 (eight years ago) link

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

xyzzzz__, Friday, 25 September 2015 23:24 (eight years ago) link

two years pass...

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!

Le Bateau Ivre, Thursday, 12 October 2017 19:59 (six years ago) link


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