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

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.

LUCKY ALAN: not JL's best.

I went on to reread DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? Not quite sure how good or bad this is. Feel it has some of PKD's cackhandedness as well as his great inventiveness.

Then I read Pynchon's story 'The Secret Integration' which seemed to me better than most other works by Pynchon that I have encountered.

Then I moved on at last to Franz Kafka's THE CASTLE. I have wanted to read this for a long time.

I am quite excited about finally reading THE CASTLE !

Feel it has some of PKD's cackhandedness as well as his great inventiveness

This is almost always the case--PKD is sort of the definition of the writer who is great despite often not being that good

And I say that as a serious fan

yeah i read man in the high castle a while back, the premise was at times brilliant, but the second half of it just dwindled into rubbish.

I think that book (which I like) is often supposed to be his best novel!

I think James M is right about PKD but perhaps it is fair to say that lots of the short stories work fine, as opposed to the novels.

dwindling rather than crescendoing is one of my favourite things in novels including MitHC

i enjoyed it as well - i guess the end disappointed me. i agree in principle nv, that any twist of the hollywood ending is fine, but i didn't think it was particularly good technically as it went on.

it's been a few years since I read it last so I wdn't defend it unreservedly, and it's not my favourite PKD, but I'm always secretly delighted when a story that looks like it should be satisfactorily resolved fizzles away into downbeat entropy

fizzles away
I was wondering why we hadn't heard from Fizzles in the past few days

Has anyone read the Inkblot Record by Dan Farrell? Assuming poetry (or whatever it is) counts for this thread. I got a real kick out of it (and it will supply me with usernames forever)

MitHC -- the odd thing is the actual title content -- the author doesn't live in a castle anymore; isn't protecting himself against anyone; isn't that interesting when met at his cocktail party (though he does, I suppose, reveal that he wrote his book with the I Ching and it is suggested that its contents are true, so that is a kind of important revelation). Odd and, as NV perhaps says above, anti-climactic, but I can't tell how deliberate that would be or to what end.

I feel like there's perhaps a recurring theme in PKD wherein the grandiose, organized social structures of control that hem in and thwart his central characters are gradually revealed to be figments of personal dissolution and paranoia, hence the anti-climacticness.

Yeah, and sometimes it's both, like---well I guess any examples might be called spoilery nowadays. Anyway, the artist grappling with his own crackpot compulsions is one of my faves (several Dylan albums come to mind), and it's why I enjoyed PKD's Valis, for instance. Those who don't get Borges would def be among those who feel let down by The Man In The High Castle, also those expecting a man in a high castle (it's going to be a cable or Web series...?)

Thought that the artist grappling with his own crackpot compulsions (incl. things that might get him arrested again) was a motivation in The Idiot also: put this tirade in the mouth of one character, that brainstorm in the head of another. Also The Brothers Karamazov, but there it's with some implicit humor x cynicism, giving the audience the expected fireworks, in a still-dazzling way (no complaints).

Also, PKD was sometimes on the catfood-and-speed diet, writing "paperback originals" for flat fees or very slow, low royalties----eventually recounted having freaked out from stress, ending up in state facility, treated, somewhat soothed and released, then presented with a large bill, raising the stress level again. Other times, even when he was relatively flush, might for instance incl. having a dream revolving around a wonderful device, waking to detail it, research, take his notes to a consulting engineer who concluded that it would indeed be wonderful, if somebody first invented a part that would do x and another for y. So PKD was out for textbooks, consultant's fees, time spent away from fiction-writing, other things.

Haven't read all the canonical novels or recent PKD posts in this thread, will just say certain of his books seems to resonate more with me, in particular Time Out of Joint and A Scanner Darkly. The first for being the PKD paranoid version/inversion of the Nerdy Everyman Saves The World trope, the second for a genuine deep feeling of sadness and brokenness.

Those who don't get Borges would def be among those who feel let down by The Man In The High Castle, also those expecting a man in a high castle (it's going to be a cable or Web series...?)

i already said i actually like people to subvert the standard heroic ending, but the actual writing in the book dwindles along with the plot. the characters are pretty awful throughout and the ending isn't even true to the foundations of those people.

like it's not like this is some incredible deep work and i was sat there eating popcorn waiting for ninjas to come and smash up the nazi regime - it's a p cheesy book apart from its clever and well-executed premise.