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

I'm sorry, Aimless -- I shouldn't have written that sentence. But your character descriptions are precisely what make the book for me an uneven triumph. It's an erratic, batty book. Unlike Dickens or Eliot, James doesn't side with anybody. Every time I read it and think James has contempt for feminists like Olive, I remember that his narrator is in and out of Ransom's consciousness. Ransom condescends to Dr. Prance and Ms. Birdseye but it's clear he also respects their industry and humorlessness. But it's also clear that James condescends to Ransom too. Our sympathies shift. Like I said yesterday, the book is weirdly structured, and not to its advantage in some places (a problem that afflicts The Tragic Muse[i] and [i]The Princess Cassamassima too, the other novels from this period); but he's got so many zingers and bon mots and bits of psychology that I laugh out loud every time I look at it again.

It comes down to my liking what you'd call its repulsiveness, I suppose.

Yes, I don't have a problem with a novel about repulsive people (especially a comic novel, which the Bostonians is in part) - but I actually don't think Olive is that repulsive, just a difficult, awkward, morally compromised person (ie human like the rest of us), someone trying to establish an identity for herself in an age where her gender and sexuality are constantly opposed, belittled, negated. James, obviously like lots of authors, frequently sprinkled parts of his own personality over his characters, and I think there's much more of him in Olive than there is Ransom - James clearly mistrusts easy charm and vapid bonhomie, both of which Basil has in abundance.

Alongside the comic, the monstrous is never really that far away in James-world; the battle over Verena, the corruption - or acquisition - of her 'innocence' is reconfigured as Quint's possession of the children in Turn of the Screw, or the way that Isobel is cruelly manipulated in Portrait of a Lady. It's a horrible world out there.

otm

Because his publisher didn't have the dough to include The Bostonians in the New York edition, James never revised it to fit his (clearer) intentions like he did the earlier books, we should note.

Yeah, the financial fine print of the history of literature is so insidious---Rampersand's notes for this Library of America omnibus edition of Richard Wright, with the restored edition of Native Son, also include the lousy changes the author made at the behest of the Book Of The Month Club, which was a huge deal in 1940, if you wanted your book to have a decent amount of distribution. Also, the bowdlerized version got him launched abroad, via Gollancz, for instance. The results were still potent enough to get him denounced in Congress and elsewhere. Maybe he would have restored it if he'd outlived a few more politicians, but he died (at 52) in 1960, and all the changes stayed in for another 30 years, according to Rampersand (good thing I didn't read it when I was supposed to).

*Rampersad*, that is. Sorry!

I finished H is for Hawk. Pretty good - I can see why it got a lot of raves. The emotional core of the book (grieving for her father) is not overplayed, instead it is kind of kept in the background and allowed to burst through occasionally, to more powerful effect. I enjoyed all the stuff about falconry, which I didn't know anything about before reading this. I wasn't quite so keen on the parts about T.H. White. Those sections kind of reminded me of Iain Sinclair's chapters in Rodinsky's Room, in the way they interrupted a more linear narrative with highly worked up literary impressions that seemed kind of irrelevant after a while.

T.H. White wrote The Goshawk about his experiences training a goshawk. I read it back in 2008. It was a brief, odd, rather meandering book, but well worth the small amount of time required to read it.

Yes, the T.H. White passages in Macdonald's book are largely about his experiences recounted in The Goshawk, though she reads it through the eyes of an experienced falconer, so the emphasis tends to be more on how he's screwing things rather than the merits of the book itself.

how he's screwing things up, rather

uhm is this thread reserved for fiction? anyway, I read Patrick Cockburn's The Rise of Islamic State yesterday, and it was very informative - I recommend it for anyone who, like me, needs an overview of what happened in Iraq last summer. Cockburn is clearly very knowledgeable and to me he seemed credible.

Now I'm back to My Struggle part 6 where I'm in the middle of a never ending Celan-essay which is a bit boring and I hope Knausgaard will soon revert to descriptions of changing diapers, shopping, preparing shrimp and other thrilling activities. (I know the Hitler-essay is yet to come, but really it can't be as boring as the Celan-reading)

It is absolutely not reserved for anything other than what you are reading now. Excluding ilx to avoid universe-destroying recursion.

i am enjoying "to the lighthouse" but the technicalities of the style are a bit irritating at times - like just a lack of clarity about who is speaking to who, or whether they're speaking. i guess this is a conscious decision?

It'll become less of a problem as you progress.

started Brendon's "Decline and Fall of the British Empire" yesterday, which I can already tell is going to be awesome

Just finished reading Ascent, Jed Mercurio, as mentioned in the DSKY-DSKY Him Sad (aka Space Flight) thread. It was good in the vein of 'summer reading'. If I comment further on it, I'll do it over in DSKY-DSKY.

I finished Us Conductors a few days ago and really liked it. Now I'm trying to decide between The Luminaries (I'm a bad kiwi, haven't read it yet) and starting My Struggle.

nm I decided to start the Patrick St Aubyn series instead

Er, Edward.

Halfway through Dostoevsky's Demons. Love the scaffolding of various levels of anxiety and madness building up. A comment here, conversation there, random punch elsewhere, bizarre duel. Everyone suffocating.

I was reading this in a retreat-like place in Italy for the last week, just totally weird contrast - like I needed an injection of noise and intensity in my life.

xpost I once started To The Lighthouse but could not figure out the language at all - makes sense that it becomes easier along the way (that's my experience with any novel/artist/etc - once you "understand" the style everything flows) but at the time I couldn't see why I should fight my way through something that should be "pleasurable"

highly recommend My Struggle for summer reading, apart from part 6 where I'm now halfway through the apparently +200 pages Hitler-essay, it's pretty action packed

🗻

If I'm understanding correctly, this is a new bear falling from a tree in Boulder, CO today (or recently). Details from fb friend are sketchy.

Halfway through Dostoevsky's /Demons/. Love the scaffolding of various levels of anxiety and madness building up. A comment here, conversation there, random punch elsewhere, bizarre duel. Everyone suffocating.

great description of it. really like demons - character as hysteria.

Cool. Which translation?

it seems i am reading A THOUSAND PLATEAUS

it is fun

but hella technical, i never realized last time i was reading it intensively, > 10 years back, that most of its difficulty is not the weirdoness, it's that the entire thing proceeds in this mysteriously rigorous-sounding framework most of whose terms are constantly opaque to you, apart from that it's starting to seem pretty systematic

I picked up the 440pp abridgement of Outlaws of the Marsh that I bought a few months ago and started it. It is episodic and rambling like a picaresque novel, and is both direct and vivid in its storytelling, without much clutter. No lengthy descriptions of scenery or fine gradations of motive. The action is driven by greed, lust and sheer animals spirits.

One large source of pleasure and fascination for me comes from its setting in Sung Dynasty China, a complex society with a highly developed infrastructure and social hierarchy; it has a flavor that's distinctly different from any western society, but also perfectly familiar in its way.

dow - its the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation.

Thanks! Also considering Magarshack, having enjoyed his version of The Idiot.

read devils in whoever did the recent oxford worlds classic edition and liked it. p/v crime and punishment was much better than the translation i'd read before that (forgotten who that was by).

This one? Looks good

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/512sIUyvkWL._SX310_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

(if image is removed: "a new translation by Michael R. Katz"---published 2-24-2000)

that's the one. only issue i had with it was the insertion of the censored "stavrogin's confession" chapter into the main text. not sure if other editions do the same, but seemed to me it would have better as an appendix.

censored by whom?!

his publisher, i think. was considered lost for a long time but then rediscovered in the twenties or thereabouts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demons_%28Dostoyevsky_novel%29#Censored_chapter

Think I'd like it better in the main text, as Dusty meant it to be, thanks will check it out

Read The Bostonians on holiday, and although I'm already a James convert I have to side with Aimless on this one. Overall, and especially with regards to the central dilemma (which took an age to make itself apparent), it struck me less as an adult novel and more a teenage melodrama. That we are constantly told and not shown Verena's 'genius' didn't bother me so much, but when it's finally revealed her particular talent is merely a superlative inconsistency and suggestibility it makes everything we were told previously seem ridiculous, and the climax and her fate more like farce than tragedy. Of his other novels that I've read (Washington Square, The American, Portrait of a Lady and The Spoils of Poynton), all but the latter have agonies just as acute but rendered with far more subtlety and dignity, and far more plausible. Sure it has its share of bon mots but the only time for me it approached classic James, his exquisite and sympathetic way of rendering a character on the horns of a true dilemma, wrestling both with their conscience and with the vicissitudes of an almost wilfully cruel world, was when Olive had to seriously consider the proposal of the Burrages in order to save Verena from Ransom.

On the other hand it was historically interesting; James I think was not unsympathetic to the cause (inasmuch as he makes it clear where his sympathies lie, Ransom is surely irredeemably repulsive throughout), but uncharitable in his treatment of it. Ransom, though, could almost be a model for a modern fedora-topped men's right's advocate, with his (even then) quaint notions of chivalry and firm belief that "there is a great deal too much [feminism]. The whole generation is womanised; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it's a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don't soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been." Even the name of the periodical that finally champions him is The Rational Review!

Also read H is For Hawk and enjoyed it, thought it was very analytical - of herself, of the hawk, of TH White - and that was just fine. Having read and enjoyed The Once and Future King may have enhanced my appreciation somewhat, especially when she considers White's Merlin as a rather tragically hopeful self portrait.

I just passed the part in Tess where she takes it on herself to baptize her dying baby. This book is cry-inducing.

Jean-Phillippe Toussaint, Bathroom -- Pretty good + light; will be reading more of this guy in the future. Parts of this felt like a direct rejoinder to Perec's A Man Asleep, but the slapstick stuff in the beginning of section II was inspired and amusing. I'll probably read Camera next, but I'm most curious to see what he does in Reticence, which sounds *heavily* indebted to Robbe-Grillet.

I finished NORA WEBSTER. I liked and appreciated it quite a lot. It is a lot better than BROOKLYN which I found largely flat and overrated. This novel is quiet, mysterious, undramatic and in a way conjures a drama and suspense from this lack of drama. It touched me and made me think quite a bit. I recommend it if you like novels that try to represent something like real life.

I couldn't finish Brooklyn it was so flat. I do appreciate a good quiet real life novel though so I'll probably give him another chance.

Jonathan Lethem, LUCKY ALAN (2015)

was: Kawabata's Thousand Cranes
now: Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita

(my reading is not usually so high-faluting)

a collection of stories/novellas chronicling the adventures of that other baker street detective, sexton blake.

I couldn't finish Brooklyn it was so flat. I do appreciate a good quiet real life novel though so I'll probably give him another chance.

Seem to recall a discussion about it, along with David Lodge's James book as well as his Wells book, and some humorous quote from a review involving the Groucho Club.

Bears reposting: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jun/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview27

Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century

I'm giving DRACULA a go for the first time

Just returned from camping, where I read the 1952 classic of mountaineering lit, Annapurna by Maurice Herzog and also pushed ahead with Outlaws of the Marsh (abridged version) which I am about 3/4 through.

The French expedition described in Annapurna was, like most major Himalayan expeditions of that era, rather harrowing. No one died and it accomplished the world's first successful summiting of an 8000 meter peak, but the price in suffering was enormous. In case anyone decides to read the book, it is probably better I don't go into detail other than to say the two climbers who reached the top suffered severe frostbite and lost all their toes and many fingers, too, as a result.

My Brilliant Friend is good. I spent most of yesterday reading it and it was hard to put down. I like how virtually every act and thought in the book contains some kind of jealousy or resentment, large or small. She knows how to write these affects.