Fall 2017 Happy Families Are Alike. What Are You Reading Now?

tagging dammit!

oh and Bedouin of the London Evening by Rosemary Tonks from Bloodaxe. It's striking me right in the heart this weekend. deep autumnal colours and landscapes of love.

Continuing my theme of reading classics I had never got round to before, I'm now reading Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son. I also felt like it was a good match to read after Faulkner - while I thought Faulkner's prose was amazing and the world beautifully and horribly drawn, I was acutely aware that I was reading a white man's perspective on deep south race relations, and that perspective is not enough, not nearly enough.

Finished the Dave Hickey, and started reading Troubles by J.G. Farrell. It kind of effortlessly draws you into a world that becomes stranger and more real the more you learn about it. Wickedly funny as well.

Imre Kertesz: Detective Story

Troubles is so good

I finished with Bill Bryson. In 1989 he had fully perfected his formula, so that The Lost Continent felt almost indistinguishable from any of his other subsequent travel/humor books I've read. I don't begrudge him his success with this formula. It is a hard row to become a marketable author who makes his living from books alone.

Now, as a sort of follow-on to the book about Brunelleschi, I have picked up the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. I last read this 40 years ago in college. He is an incorrigible braggart, but he is also a talented storyteller, whose stories capture the intricate and unfamiliar world of the renaissance in Italy and France. They're good yarns, so it's cool with me that he is the unconquerable hero at the center of every tale he tells.

SPQR by mary beard

Finished Light and Darkness by Soseki. Up until the last third the plot the 'plot' was something like man has operation and the four other people in his life argue with and around him, at various levels of consequence. The shape of the story finally materialised in the last section as the main character checks himself out of the hospital and visits the woman who walked out on him.

Soseki died before finishing, so he might have written another 500 pages of those two sorting each other out. I felt it really took off in those last 100 pages (his earlier novel The Gate has a similar set-up where the main character goes to a monastery to find something...that going away was similarly done)

Postscript: what makes Cellini's endless self-worship palatable and somewhat engaging is that he doesn't stint his praise of others. He obviously saw the whole world as a heroic and highly colorful place, filled with brave, skillful and handsome men, beautiful and gracious women and amazingly spirited horses. Set against these are the evil, scheming scoundrels and craven cowards who act as the sworn enemies of the brave and honest men. It's a thoroughly boyish worldview, but kind of sweet.

I love the Soseki I've read, need to get more

Aimless, have you read Vasari? I want to, also interested in those two new Da Vinci bios.

I read various bits and pieces of Vasari long ago and I presently own a Penguin Classics paperback that abridges Vasari to ~465 pp. that I can refer to at need. iirc, Vasari is about on a level with Diogenes Laertius, collecting mostly entertaining anecdotes with some dull stretches interspersed.

Saw recent v. favorable mention of C. De Vere translation of Vasari, unabridged Everyman's Library ed.

I love the Soseki I've read, need to get more

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Friday, 27 October 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I suspect he achieved something strange and unique for his time with his last few works - in one sense there is v little there in some of these intrigues, but they do amount...I would say almost all of his last few books are worth a read (NYRB did an edition of The Gate). Light and Darkness is out of print here and you come across in this old picador edition, almost all have a broken spine.

Ron Chernow - Grant
A collection of James tales called A London Life.

Stendhal - The Red and The Black. 20 pp in and I have said this before and I'll say it again: the canon is often excellent in lit.

i was spoilered for the red and the black by reading the stupid introduction and hence have never finished it

(also it was a v ancient pb and entirely fell apart as i read)

Well mark I have read the first few chapters...and the last few sentences in the last chapter so know what happens. Its ok though :-)

I finished Cellini's Autobiography. The traits I mentioned upthread remained consistent to the end of the book. Everything is vivid, larger than life and he is at the center of it all, deserving of mountains of credit for his genius when things turn out well and never to blame when things go wrong. I was interested to note that Vasari was one of the many artists he roundly disparaged and considered and enemy.

My next book is A Way of Life, Like Any Other, Darcy O'Brien. It's a NYRB reprint, somewhat humorous, but so far it seems more sardonic than comical. It's about growing up among Hollywood splendors, born as the child of famous and wealthy actor-parents, whose careers perish, then whose lives fall apart in rather histrionic fashion. Most of the book takes place After The Fall.

I've only just begun it, so I have as yet little to say about it.

Loved that book. Guy is a Joyce and Flann O’Brien scholar. Made the mistake of reading his true crime books. Which were really well written, but that actually made them harder to take.

He lulls you with a false sense of security with the well-turned phrases and then -wham!-the bottom drops out

reading a big biog on joseph losey, and joyce carol oates short stories 'heat' & my brilliant friend ~

What's the Losey biog like?

detailed - its the one subtitled a revenge on life by david caute

Great title - will be on the lookout.

I'm not a fan of Amis/McEwan/Barnes, but my university library was giving away free copies of "Sense of an Ending" - I read it over a day and it was... okay? Compelling plot but wincing useless dialogue and no sense of place. It's kind of a mini-me Atonement. Both of them do that really annoying thing of being genre books that end with a deliberate anticlimax to prove how very "above the genre" they are.

Both of them do that really annoying thing of being genre books that end with a deliberate anticlimax to prove how very "above the genre" they are.

I can't really think of Sense Of An Ending as a genre novel, unless we're doing the "literary realist fiction is a genre" thing. Sure there's a mystery in it, but it's not a crime novel/detective kind of mystery.

I will agree with you the ending's rubbish, though - felt very melodramatic and ridiculous to me, like something straight out of a 19th century novel.

No, you're right, it's not a genre novel. But the trope of using mystery and suspense in the service of a deliberate anticlimax - "because that's how life really is" - is (and has always been) a tiresome cliche, imho - in both literary and genre fiction. I think Tana French gets it right, though.

(The ending of Broken Harbour, for example. It's a quotidian ending, but it's not like it retroactively judges you for enjoying the "thriller" elements.)

george meredith - the egoist

I finished A Way of Life, Like Any Other. It's an interesting book that I'd have to study a while to get at. The story is plain enough. Everything that happens it described clearly enough to understand. What lingers is the author's voice and tone, which kind of hovers in an indeterminate space, touching irony, sadness, farce and a hint of anger, while rarely touching any one of these notes exclusively, but more often striking several at once, as if playing minor chords. The effect never raised me out of my seat in amazement, but it did affect me. Worth a read. Plus, it's short.

I haven't hit on my next book. I keep toying with the idea of plowing into a monstrously long book, like Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, but so far I'm too timorous to take the plunge. Maybe further into winter. I'll probably make a brief excursion into Greene's Ministry of Fear, instead.

I had a go at Very Merry by Zsigmond Moriscz, Hungarian Minot Gentry hi-Hils, got bored and drifted off about halfway through.

Then I read “Mothering Sunday” by Graham Swift, on a lens from my mum, it was alright, I liked the way it seemed abstracted from a huge Barbara Taylor Bradford potboiler but it left me largely unmoved.

I read the 33 1/3 about The Raincoats, as covered elsewhere.

I read a book of sharp little short stories by Lara Williams, called “Treats”.

Now I’m a chapter in to “Let The Blood of Man Not Flow” by Mikhailo Stelmakh, Ukrainian Soviet mythmaking by the looks.

aimless, i forget, do you have a kindle at all? burton is surprisingly lighter-feeling when you don't have to lug around that brick of an nyrb edition.

I own a Kindle, but I rarely make much use of it. I own an older edition of Robert Burton in hardback, copyright 1927, Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith, editors, Farrar & Rinehart publishers, ~1000 pages total including front matter. All the hundreds of Latin tags are translated into English, which is nice.

I'm already partway into Ministry of Fear with a Georges Simenon novel on deck. As I said, the prospects for my tackling an ultra-long book will improve as winter deepens. Last winter it was The Man Without Qualities, Musil. The previous winter it was Shelby Foote's civil war history.

After a few books i could not get into, due to failures sometimes on their part, sometimes on mine, I'm reading B. A Shapiro's 'The Art Forger', a crime novel which is not exactly brilliant, but is very interesting on the details of creating a fake Great Master painting

Yesterday I finished Moby-Dick, and it took me til the very end to realize that everything Ahab says is mock-Shakespeare.

Had Kazou Ishiruo's The Buried Giant lying around for over a year now, guess the recent Nobelification is as good a reason as any to tackle it.

Be interested to hear what you think - I keep on feeling I should read it (great reviews, including some people I trust, nobel prize etc), but can't summon up the enthusiasm. also reading the mysterious affair at styles atm, so enthusiasm for evenly moderately heavy lifting is at a bit of an ebb at the moment.

Aw, Fizzles, read some shiny bauble or other and give yourself a lull. I have a soft spot for the Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian when I need some light entertainment that isn't poorly written. Afterwards Ishiguro may not seem like such a slog.

Ishiguro Ishiruo

^ brain fart

No, you were right, it was Daniel's brain that dealt it

I'm an ishiguro fan but I cannot fathom the good reviews for the buried giant.

Ursula K. LeGuinn came out against it, was irked by something Ishiguro said about it being a gamble for readers to accept fantasy tropes - LeGuinn rules obv and has fought this good fight for a long time, but in a world where GoT is the biggest show on tv, ehhhh. And at the same time, Ishiguro wasn't wrong to assume much of his audience would be somewhat resistant.

Dan it's Ishiuro

Oh shit, sorry.

...wait, no it isn't! :O

Dan it's Le Guin

https://i.imgur.com/6VjoC0J.png

Dan sonned in a fake news beef?