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

I only started DORIAN GRAY.
I also started REALITY HUNGER.

But most of my reading is still Kafka: an old hardback starting with DESCRIPTION OF A STRUGGLE then a bunch of shorter pieces. The very short ones (like 'the top', 'the helmsman') are new to me.

DESCRIPTION OF A STRUGGLE is a remarkable piece of work - a missing link, if one were needed, between Dostoyevsky and Beckett, or Hamsun and 1960s metafiction.

Ellmann's Joyce
Ulysses
V1 of Roy Foster's Yeats
Bit of Aquinas on the side.

I've had The Apprentice Mage in my closet for years.

I've started it before, but more in the mood this time. Foster's great imo - great marshal of information, thoughtful, subtle, obvs great on context - but he can be a bit of a slog, not often a lively writer.

i would agree with all of that tbh

i think i've had that book literally half my lifetime and not got much beyond p100

I've started it twice!

I admit I have not properly read THE APPRENTICE MAGE either - and I have BOTH VOLUMES a couple of feet from me - but actually by many standards of historical scholarship, I think RFF *is* a lively writer. Maybe less so in this work, but certainly in MODERN IRELAND, LUCK AND THE IRISH, THE IRISH STORY, VIVID FACES. A tremendous historian.

I have read Ellmann's WBY biography in full.

i am reading about morality : (

i am reading the Dispossessed. Did I already mention that?

agree, by the standards of most contemporary historians (low bar maybe) he is a good writer, especially over shorter distances - part of what sent me for another go at MBY V1:TAM was his DNB entry on Yeats. But I remember MODERN IRELAND being a bit of a grind - I have it around more as reference than reading (haven't read his others).

Hrabal - Harlequin's Millions. About half-way through and today was just thinking how good this is. Its very Eastern European (really Hungarian) in the way it handles nostalgia for a past that has been crushed by ugly historical forces, but how Hrabal writes about people and what they do - how they embrace and drink together at a pub over a football match - that says much about how they go on whatever is happening in the background.

The writing shapes up as different from Krudy et al. tho' in the way it unravels and expands, each chapter is one paragraph. Ultimately he likes to show-and-tell in streams and recount other stories and experiences instead of character and dialogues.

Lately, I've been reading Jane Bowles's play In the Summer House and the stories Paul excised from Two Serious Ladies (the narrative thread following Senorita Cordoba, originally the third serious lady), René Crevel's My Body and I (interesting so far for its gracefully winding prose and the vigor of its disgust, as well as its reflections on queer life in 1920s Paris, although so far those are elliptical and couched in much the same perhaps defensive tone of disdain as are the comparable scenes in Sodom and Gomorrah), Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others (remarkable for Chiang's ability to revolve conceptual problems, although so far his prose and his characters are typically blander), Shirley Jackson's late fiction in Come Along With Me, and Lyndall Gordon's biography of Charlotte Brontë.

I am back from the mountains. While there I read The Painter of Signs, R.K. Narayan, and O, Pioneers!, Willa Cather. I'm also partway into King Leopold's Ghost. Because I drove 350 miles today, I think I'll wait and write a few comments on these tomorrow or the next day. I'm tired.

I really like Narayan. Also like that his full name was Rasipuram Krishnaswami Iyer Narayanaswami.
And Cather is usually marvellous. The Neglected Books Page just today mentioned a book of hers I had never heard of: http://neglectedbooks.com/?p=3395

Love narayan! Never met anyone else who's read him tbh

- Jack Spicer - My Vocabulary did this to me (also Peter Riley's essay on The Holy Grail)
- Ovid's Erotic Poems trans Peter Green
- Kierkegaard - Either/Or
- Langland - Piers plowman

I found the Narayan book very engaging. He does not subject his characters to painstaking psychological dissection, but tells a brief but solid story with simplicity and assurance. In the end, you know the characters at least as well as you know most of the real people who surround you, and you have seen them undergo a complex and perplexing life-altering experience -- which is how many life-altering experiences seem to happen. I think I would have appreciated it even more if I were familiar with the Ramayana and the traditional stories of Hinduism, and so could better understand the passing allusions to them. Would recommend.

The Cather was also a fine book. It is one of her earlier novels, written about 1914. She is especially strong in her descriptions of the prairie and succeeds in making it a leading character in her story, since its presence and the need to respond to it drives many of the actions of the people and inescapably shapes them. The plot builds up to what her contemporary readers would have comfortably accepted as a melodrama, but she deftly raises the bar and converts her story into something with more depth and dignity, more on the order of tragedy. The payoff in the final few pages is both subdued and powerful. Would also recommend.

I'm only a quarter of the way into King Leopold's Ghost, and while it is not really necessary to write an expose of colonialism, this book does a great job of digging under the surface of the nineteenth century's pretensions to morality and progress and showing the dirty details of greed, self-preening, and ambition of the powerful, and the hugely ugly consequences for the powerless they took as their targets. The history of the Congo makes an excellent exemplar of colonialism as it really worked.

Cather is wondrous. She should get the kudos and writing lab recs that Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner do.

I think I would have appreciated it even more if I were familiar with the Ramayana and the traditional stories of Hinduism

Narayan actually did a version of the Ramayana in prose--very readable

My own recent reading:

Hafez: Faces of Love -- Medieval Muslim/Persian bisexual love/sex/booze poetry -- delightful, really
Malthus: An Essay on the Principle of Population -- so far so OTM; surprisingly and pleasingly clear prose style, too

Checked, and Penguin publishes the Narayan Ranayana

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0143039679.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

He's def my favorite indian novelist. Understated, subtle and v evocative of and sympathetic towards his subjects.

Best entry point imo is malgudi days.

Malthus' math didn't bear out iirc

that's my impression, but he still makes a persuasive argument

Although not about everything, having read some more. And people were itching for the Singularity even 200 years ago.
"The great and unlooked for discoveries that have taken place of late years in natural philosophy, the increasing diffusion of general knowledge from the extension of the art of printing, the ardent and unshackled spirit of inquiry that prevails throughout the lettered and even unlettered world, the new and extraordinary lights that have been thrown on political subjects which dazzle and astonish the understanding, and particularly that tremendous phenomenon in the political horizon, the French Revolution, which, like a blazing comet, seems destined either to inspire with fresh life and vigour, or to scorch up and destroy the shrinking inhabitants of the earth, have all concurred to lead many able men into the opinion that we were touching on a period big with the most important changes, changes that would in some measure be decisive of the future fate of mankind. It has been said that the great question is now at issue, whether man shall henceforth start forwards with accelerated velocity towards illimitable, and hitherto unconceived improvement..."

I thought King Leopold's Ghost fascinating and need to reread it. Since Joseph Conrad had dealings with the regime as a sea captain it does seem to be a source for Kurtz. The Leopold Congo that is.
&all in the supposed name of eradicating slavery?

I just picked up a book called Season to Taste an autobiographical work by Molly Birnbaum. It's about her dream of being a chef being effected by her losing her sense of smell in brain injury caused by a jogging/car accident.
I've only got as far as her physical recovery from the damage to her legs and torso so don't know what the rest of the story is.
She can't taste and has defered the start date on a culinary college place so could be permanent.
I have a feeling I read an excerpt from this in either Guardian or Observer magazine when the book came out. I just found this ina charity shop so didn't make the connection immediately but do recognise the story.

Also got Simon Reynolds' Energy Flash for 25c. It's the only one by him I'm aware of and haven't read. Story of Rave and Dance Culture.

I also started Alan Clayton's bio of Serge Gainsbourg which I've had for a while without reading.

Nice score on the Reynolds. Reading Maurice Shadbolt's Danger Zone (abt the crew of a boat protesting French nuclear testing on Mururoa atoll),it's good and interesting but so riddled w printing errors I'm having real problems enjoying it

That Reynolds book is probably my favourite music crit book of all time

Currently mired in a crew of books that will take months more to finish:

Capital in the 21st Century - Thomas Piketty
Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening - Joseph Goldstein
The Recognitions - William Gaddis
Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion
The Egoist - George Meredith
Hark! A Vagrant - Kate Beaton

All are great!

Elizabeth Gaskell has been a hugely fun first read.

Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps : the opening essay is the most profound reflection on Dylan I've read.

I think her contribution to Stranded is still my favorite text on the VU.

Mine too.

I read her essay on the VU's third album today in Vinyl Deeps and it was terrific, emphasizing the sadness of Reed's singing/lyrics. I mean, you're thinking, duh, but it's not something I'd focused on before.I don't think I know the Stranded piece.

It's in Vinyl Deeps, I think: it's just titled "The Velvet Underground."

Or, actually, I think that is the essay you read today.

xp Which Gaskell?

Silvana Ocampo: Thus Were Their Faces -- story collection: her stuff from the POV of children is esp good, but this is all wonderful so far

argh, SilvIna

Finishing Grapes of Wrath today, thinking of "Situations arise/because of the weather/And no kinds of love/Are better than others." Of course, in that song and this book, it's also what you bring to the weather: no matter what it takes from you (and sometimes making a crazy swap meet), there's all this stuff inside you can't get rid of, though it may get all shook up, and spill out in new combinations, from unforeseen openings---wounds, sometimes, but lots of others too, as all of the preceding has to do with various kinds of humor, but mainly sardonic.
One example: thought hangdawg Pa Joad, continually showed up by the much more adaptable Ma, was finally rousing hiself to rally a collective effort in which all saved all from being lost in the flood---but a collapsing cottonwood tree spoiled that, and pretty soon a man wanted to see him and complain, But the rain, the rain, the rain beat that fire out too, down into the gray--until it got its second wind, o shit. Expected arcs of melodrama usually end up getting in line, hitching up with the segments of practical considerations, which can be minutely detailed or huge, but either way, just keep banging along, seizing on pleasures when possible, more often than I expected).
There are rhetorical interludes I could live with out, but fewer than expected, and he's got me reading other things about the Dust Bowl now, also just got Burns doc from the library.
Don't yet feel the need to read more Steinbeck, but glad I finally got to this one.

Not that there isn't some deadly nastiness in GoW as well---part of the impression that even the biggest baddies are basically just trying to hang on the course of unforeseen events, which their greed and fear make that much worse. And one of the main goodies gets killed in a business-like sentence, all in a night's work.

Was really struck by how you got the feeling that when people were separated in Grapes of Wrath they may as well have been gone forever--the impossibility of finding someone again in that sort of environment, even though it was 20th-Century America and the people weren't actually in hiding, was a bit gob-smacking

Elizabeth Gaskell - Wives and Daughters.

Boy, she's good.

Her Gothic tales/ghost stories/Salem witch stories are pretty amazing, too

http://www.friedmanmichael.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/martiandawn.jpg

is that Roman wearing saddle shoes

Believe so

still ticking along with to the lighthouse, but also been reading incognito lounge by denis johnson. was on holidays this week and listened to a good few new yorker podcasts. donald barthelme's "the bodyguard" was so amazing that i now have to read more of him. that new robert musil arrived also.