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

(Wharton? I meant Waugh, duh)

Some good ones I read in the last couple of weeks:

Jennifer Egan - Manhattan Beach
Gerbrand Bakker - The Twin
Sayed Kashua - Second Person Singular
Magda Szabó - The Door (thanks, ILB!)
Sebastian Barry - Days Without End
Emmanuel Carrère - Class Trip

The best one was probably Days Without End. A really good novel about the American Civil War, told by a very modern protagonist.
The Door took a while to get going, but turned brilliant in the last 80 pages.

The story that's impacted me most so far is "The German Prisoner" by James Hanley, whom I'd previously not heard of.

Highly recommend James Hanley's novel Boy, equally grim in its way and successfully prosecuted for obscenity during the author's lifetime. Love this from the Wiki entry on it:

Novelist Hugh Walpole, in a review, described Boy as "A novel that is so unpleasant and ugly, both in narration and in incident, that I wonder the printers did not go on strike while printing it"

Yeah, I saw that mentioned in the author blurb at the back. E.M. Forster repped for it!

'Boy' is one of the most depressing things I have ever read, and I've read a lot of depressing things.

Sylvia Plath - The Bell Jar + her poetry from '62 till her death. I liked the novel, its very much of a piece that is comfortable (as with a few Hollywoood films at the time) in taking in psychoanalysis, mental health, certain (now controversial) treatments. What she does in the book that the films wouldn't do is slap an agreeable ending.

Bernard Sumner's memoir Chapter and Verse. Still at him being a kid, just taking his 11 plus and trying to avoid the local non-Grammar High School.

I Swear I Was There about the first 2 Sex pistols gigs in Manchester teh ones put on by Howard devoto and Pete Shelley.

FOPP has a stack of great titles in the 2 for £5 section
also got a thing on the Who in the 60s and 77 Sulphate Strip.

Might go back for a couple of the books on style, The Bag I'm in for one.

New thread: And The Snow Fell Softly On ILB: What Are You Reading Now Winter 2017/18

In last weekend's WSJ, Daphne Merkin reviewed massive new collection of early letters from Plath, with at least one more volume to come. Her mother had her trained to report back on everything, everything, and she seems to have enjoyed it, is DM's impression, plus the "microscopic" focus, though disconcerting at first, becomes very involving, hypnotic even. But not too zone-out/in for perspective/patterns.

I've got a vol of Letters Home to come, and really looking forward to cracking on in 2018. I do like Plath's poetry but the talent of course was cut short, and from reading her I felt there was so much more to come (which I possibly don't feel about Kafka, say, but there was so much more of it, and it was miraculously something on a sentence-level.)