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

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.

For a genre-busting sui-generous cranker outer of paperback originals where you could smell the potent blend of flop sweat, cigarette odor, ink and glue, he was not nearly the stylist that, say, Jim Thompson was.

I think his style is pretty good on the whole, given the biographical details

yeah i am not trying to slate him - i liked mithc. i guess just find it ridiculous that criticising a popular sci-fi author would equate to some sort of luddite anti-art stance.

hey no argument here

is mithc compared to 1984?

( fwiw was not responding to lg, just x post to self)

ditto for the most part, except that, for me, its clever and well-executed premise overcomes the cheese. His style, in novels especially, is like that old stoner in Carver's "Cathederal" who just seems like a mumblin' rando at first, but gradually reels the listener in. Although I like PKD better than Carver's guy.

Or it *can* be like that, not always, but he requires patience while the story emerges from the grey plodding (in the case of his weaker books, can be like he just started typing, because the meter's running--but could be that Thompson gets more out of this; I haven't read much of him).

Also agree w this, although guess it's mostly about first part
I'm now reading The Man In The High Castle - pretty cleverly done, so overtly post-modern, makes you think about accepted belief systems. Really cool to see one of the Japanese characters asking the American to explain Ms Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West - don't think I've ever seen a shoutout like this, and I just read the latter a few months ago.

― Junior Dictionary (LocalGarda), Monday, March 16, 2015 5:52 AM (4 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Man in the High Castle is the only Dick I've read, and it's been a few years, so I don't remember it that well, but I share the sense of being kind of underwhelmed by the style (or lack thereof), thinking the alternative history premise not terribly original, and not getting at all the ending. I guess I was expecting something a bit more gonzo, rather than the kind of pulpy cardboard prose.

Currently reading: Deborah Eisenberg's third collection, All Around Atlantis. Feel like she's starting to hit her stride again after the somewhat uneven 2nd collection.

I spent most of two summers ago reading Eisenberg's big collection. She's a minor master, I think. I love her rhythms.

Just finished: Raziel Reid, When Everything Feels Like the Movies
Just starting: Colm Toibin, Nora Webster

Loved Deborah Eisenberg's Twilight of the Superheroes, too. I didn't know about All Around Atlantis--I had The Stories So Far and Superheroes, no idea there was a volume in between. And of course it's OOP

Finally got around to reading 'Lee, Myself and I', which I'm enjoying more than I thought it would. I think I was put off because I wanted a full bio, but this is nice.

I enjoyed The Man In The High Castle when I read it a couple of years ago. I cant remember the ending though! i know it didnt piss me off anyway

has anyone read nightwalking: a nocturnal history of london, by matthew beaumont? i read a longread extract from it a few weeks ago, reminded of it as my copy arrived this week. really interesting history of people on the london streets at night.

the extract is here: http://blog.longreads.com/2015/06/29/vagabonds-crafty-bauds-and-the-loyal-huzza-a-history-of-london-at-night/

i love longreads generally but i found this one in particular was enthralling.

I spent most of two summers ago reading Eisenberg's big collection. She's a minor master, I think. I love her rhythms.

Yeah, that's the one I'm slowly working through - the big book of all 4 collections. I took a longish break after the first 2. "Minor master" sounds about right, or "minor-key master". There's a current of sadness that runs through her work, though not in a lugubrious way. She has an unsentimental way of portraying people who are making bad choices, in unhealthy relationships, or just generally failing at life.

man, i remember almost nothing of the one eisenberg thing i read -- do you think she got the title from alan moore or arrived at it independently?

Surely from Moore

Han Kang: The Vegetarian - a Novel. What it says, about a Korean woman who gives up meat -- the precise reason as to why this happens is knocked off as a dream that is never explained. Mostly because anyone around her isn't interested. This takes a detour or three, becoming a really brutal experience by the end.

On the one hand, Kang doesn't try to explain her - you'd think that would make your imagination take flight but its just as likely you'd be dismissive of the main character as an asexual simpleton who cannot be in anyway thought about very much, she is so far from most people - as its made clear when she is viewed from three points. There are a couple of great scenes where she ends making an 'art' piece - and funnier if you know of Yayoi Kusama's work.

I wouldn't even put MitHC in a top 10 PKD list. It's middling work at best, enlivened primarily by the I Ching device and the weird sense of dislocation conveyed in certain sequences. Characters, plotting, and prose, however, are alternate between being slapdash and workmanlike. I am not really sure why it won the Hugo, a process which is certainly as political as it is meretricious, but doubtless the award helped to burnish his reputation and keep the book in print, which meant it inevitably became one of his more widely read books. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? achieved similar ubiquity due to Bladerunner, but that one isn't a particularly outstanding entry in his oeuvre either.

That being said, I am a huge PKD fan and I do think he had an engaging prose style and a capacity to be genuinely moving, surprising, and confounding, sometimes all at once. A Scanner Darkly is a good example of this, where the empathy for the characters really shines through, even when the plot takes extensive detours through drug-babble territory and paranoid conspiracy theories. And he could be very, very funny. Constantly aware of the literary backwater he was toiling under, he gleefully used and abused sci-fi tropes, making up ridiculous words and concepts as a wink-wink way of acknowledging their silliness - and then abruptly inverting his treatment of them by making them central to the emotional or intellectual core of the story. Oh the tragedies of the lowly wub-fur importer, for ex. Or the Denebian slime mold who exhibits more human empathy and spiritual understanding than any of his human neighbors in his conapt. I would say if you're going to dip into PKD's work, don't start with the most famous ones, they aren't famous for the right reasons.

I finished the abridgement of Outlaws of the Marsh, China's answer to the Robin Hood folk lore. I can see many elements in it that got taken up by martial arts movies. Some day I should poll the nicknames of the characters, such as Timely Rain and Ten Feet of Steel, but to be honest I've had a similar urge to poll the names of characters in various Icelandic sagas, too, and have never yet done the work of compiling them, so precedent is not on my side.

I'll be setting out in a couple of days on a lengthy hiking/camping trip (9 days). I'll be equipped with about 6 or 7 titles at my disposal for my evening's entertainment, all fairly short, so I shall probably have a variety of comments to make on my return.

ootis is v accurate on pkd, i think

i am tempted, momentarily, to start an old-ILE style s&d pkd thread