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

after ShariVari mentioned Agata Pyzik's Poor But Sexy I read it and recommend it also; Eastern European politics, communism, gender, film, post-punk; I learned a ton and want to go deeper.

Wolf solent takes the prize! Hadn't heard of it, have not investigated too closely.

Surely you will only get full closure when I've read and reported back. Will try not to keep you all on tenterhooks too long.

Sadly I've given up. Couldn't get behind the odd combination of florid mysticism and the everyday tales of cheerful child-abusing townfolk. Found Wolf an absurd man-child, oblivious to the feelings of others, besotted with a girl half his age before even exchanging a single word with her.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKuJDc-Wmrk

otm

Ian McEwan, SWEET TOOTH (2012)

sadly his weakest book since amsterdam

i'm back to the sci-fi.

https://scontent-ord1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xaf1/v/t1.0-9/11987039_10154213186167137_3409655425967590269_n.jpg?oh=2acaf9bbe0c86e84f082f556341f809a&oe=56788AA1

I finished the Jessica Mitford memoir. It was, as I expected, quite amazing. Her authorial voice has an understated, but wicked, humor and she uses just enough exaggeration to heighten the amusement, but the details of her life were extraordinary without any exaggeration necessary. I would definitely recommend it.

Now I've started into Gore Vidal's Creation, which is different kettle of fish entirely.

between library books so dippin back into Narayan's Malgudi Days

I've only read a couple budrys shorts - how is that, scott?

the cover is quite beautiful, whatever the contents are like

i've only read his short stories as well. this is pretty funny so far. in this book, Pluto is for losers.

i don't think i've ever read any jessica mitford. i know i've never read an american way of death. i would definitely like to read the memoir though. i'm definitely a nancy fan. loved pursuit of love/love in a cold climate so much. in my american way.

The Memoir, american way of death and her essay collection 'Poison Penmanship' are all well worth reading: the memoir's probably the best, as her family and life were so interesting and odd as aimless says

Balzac - The Wild Ass' Skin
Margaret Leech - In the Days of McKinley
Sarah Vowell - Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

little did ms. leech know her book would be rechristened in the days of denali

not sure if SWEET TOOTH is good but it is incredibly readable!

I think it is actually quite interesting and unusual in being such a meta-commentary on the author's own early work. And (less unusual) in inhabiting a genre, with advice from Le Carré. Whatever else about IM, he can produce a page-turner.

quiet at work this week so got through 3 books

Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper I enjoyed a lot and the elements that I didn't really 'get'(etta's journey) were compensated for by the quality of the writing.

Alice and the Fly by James Rice which was p bleak tbh.

Black Moon by Kenneth Calhoun which has a terrific premise (the world succumbs to insomnia and almost everyone can't sleep which leads to madness, hallucinations etc the few who can still sleep must be careful because if caught napping they are subject to attack from the sleepless) The first half is excellently realised but it trails off badly imo.

Anybody read MacDonald Harris? First part seems garrulous, but crtl + F name of Borges or title Herma and gets more interesting, I think
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/books/review/michael-chabon-on-macdonald-harris-novel-herma.html?smid=tw-nytbooks&smtyp=cur&_r=0

this guy lives near me. came into my store with his dog for years and i never knew he was a hugo award-winning SF dude. nice guy. i got the whole trilogy. never read him before.

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I'm only a couple of hundred pages into Creation, but I have the gist of it. Vidal frames the book as the memoir of Zoroaster's grandson in old age, who has been everywhere from Greece to China and met every important philosophical or religious figure of the time. As such it has no actual plot other than his travels, observations and conversations, but it crams in an enormous amount of well-researched history from a very formative period in 'world civilization'.

As is inevitable in historical novels, the speech and habits of thought of all the characters are those of modern people, slightly adapted to the fit the milieu and material of the book. In this case, they are modeled upon wealthy and politically powerful americans and europeans. Luckily, Vidal was both witty and sophisticated and he transferred these traits to his major characters in abundance, so Creation is unfailingly entertaining and occasionally illuminating.

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. Might need to break it up, read slabs of it between other books

Reading Willa Cather's My Mortal Enemy for the first time and finished my second reading of The Professor's House. I've said here before that Cather should be revered as much as Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

She's great. I'm sad that the only book by her, besides some short stories, that I haven't yet read is an autobiography she ghost-wrote for the publisher S S McClure.

I'm impressed (most of the way through) with Sarah Gerard's brief first novel, Binary Star. It's lightly plotted and tightly focused on the relationship between the anorexic narrator and her unstable, probably alcoholic boyfriend (the social contexts of eating disorders are sketched out, though the novel never becomes as essayistic as Chris Kraus's Aliens and Anorexia), but Gerard's prose is effective at evoking the claustrophobic experience of hostile, ongoing self-scrutiny.

Speaking of Willa Cather, I'm now reading My Antonia. It's my first Cather. So far it's definitely my kind of thing. I love that story-within-a-story kind of framing device. Jack London often used it as well. The decision to narrate it from the perspective of a young boy seems particularly inspired - helps to create the right amount of distance to what could be rather grim events.

You'll love A Lost Lady and TPH then.

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

"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.

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.

ok fine i'll read hope abandoned

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.

New thread: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall 2015 ist. What Are You Reading Now?

Tausenddank

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)

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

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!