September, 2011--Early autumn reading

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September, 2011--Early autumn reading

1CliffBurns
Sept. 1, 2011, 10:18 am

Time to turn over another month.

I begin September by polishing off the last stories in James Sallis' A CITY EQUAL TO MY DESIRE.

Sallis is a difficult writer to classify, working in a number of genres, a literary hybrid. Which is probably why he hasn't received nearly as much acclaim as he deserves. He's a marvel.

2nymith
Sept. 1, 2011, 11:57 am

I'm within sight of the end of The Portable Beat Reader, my appointed summer reading. Overall...

Poetry: Mostly underwhelming. I couldn't see myself sitting down with a book by any of them except Ginsberg, Corso and Ferlinghetti. I was also impressed by precursor Kenneth Rexroth and wish the book had included more of the people who'd "inspired" the movement and less of the third-raters within that movement.

Prose: Kerouac was better than his imitators by a long shot. The only ones with a sense of humour appear to have been Bob Dylan and Diane DiPrima. The first one I'll read an entire work by? Probably Burroughs. (touchstone refusing to give me anything but Gerald F. Gaus).

3anna_in_pdx
Sept. 1, 2011, 12:03 pm

2: I don't know, I feel that Ken Kesey was an amazing writer as well, Sometimes a Great Notion being on my "top favorite novels ever"... doesn't he count as a beat?

4CliffBurns
Bearbeitet: Sept. 1, 2011, 12:24 pm

Burroughs was by far the most accomplished of the Beats though I'm not sure I would entirely associate him with that group. He transcends categorization.

There were a lot of hangers on, people who smoked dope, shot smack, scribbled a string of disconnected sentences and believed that gave them cred. John Giorno parlayed his relationship with Burroughs et al to promote his own pitiful scribbles and I never had the slightest respect for Jim Carroll, thought he was a poser.

Kerouac was vastly over-rated in my view and his literary reputation is very much on the wane. A few of Ginsberg's poems are of interest but in terms of 20th century poets he is decidedly a minor figure.

Kesey always operated on the fringes, marching to his own peculiar drumbeat--I've never thought of him as a Beat but perhaps others disagree...

5ajsomerset
Sept. 1, 2011, 12:56 pm

The idea that Kerouac was much better than his imitators isn't much of an endorsement for the Beats. I tend to agree with Cliff that Kerouac is greatly overrated, and I think his reputation will see what economists like to call "a correction" when the baby boom expires.

To give him his due, his writing about music is excellent. Not many writers can write convincingly about music. Here you can draw a line from Kerouac through Barry Hannah to Ray Robertson, at the end of which people ask, who the hell is Ray Robertson? That's the fate of a lot of good writers, alas....

6kswolff
Sept. 1, 2011, 1:51 pm

Re: Kerouac, I read a fair share of his stuff in high school, during my Beatnik Appreciation Period -- my resemblance to Maynard G. Krebs notwithstanding. But now, after discovering Bolano, Beckett, Bernhard, Vollmann, Waugh, etc., he comes across as pretty weak beer.

Reading Destinations by Jan Morris A collection of her Rolling Stone articles from the 1970s. A nice companion piece, since I'm reading her science fiction travelogue Hav

7nymith
Sept. 1, 2011, 2:46 pm

I liked what I read of Kerouac mainly due to the romance of travel. Having never been outside of Minnesota in my life, the notion of going "on the road" carries a certain allure that Kerouac appears to have cashed in on. It also made me kind of interested in trying out jazz.

8CliffBurns
Sept. 1, 2011, 3:18 pm

I think I've said so before but...if you haven't read Kerouac by the time you're 19, don't bother. He does not age well and once you start reading superior authors, he pales to nonexistence by comparison.

Gimme Bill Burroughs any day. CITIES OF THE RED NIGHT is a monumental novel.

9CliffBurns
Sept. 1, 2011, 3:35 pm

P.S. You and Karl are both Minnesota boys? Cool.

It's the one state that understands, like Saskatchewan, the true meaning of "fucking COLD".

10nymith
Sept. 1, 2011, 4:05 pm

Guess I'll have to move On the Road higher on my list before it's too late.

9 - Yep, Minnesota. Short summers and long winters where it's 30 below at night and the frost so thick you can't see the world outside the window. Woodstoves and black bears. Gardening is a struggle, but there's always time for reading....

And by the way, I'm a girl.

11CliffBurns
Sept. 1, 2011, 4:15 pm

Whoops. My mistake.

12inaudible
Sept. 1, 2011, 10:29 pm

I'm still reading Infinite Jest, but I picked up Travels: Collected Writings, 1950-1993 by Bowles for around-the-city reading on the train and such.

13inaudible
Bearbeitet: Sept. 1, 2011, 10:31 pm

2> Rexroth, Patchen, and DiPrima were so much better than all of the other beat poets. I think the rest will be remembered more for their personalities than their poetry.

Kenneth Patchen might actually be the best modern American poet after Ezra Pound... hard to say though. I haven't read Charles Olson's Maximus Poems yet.

14wookiebender
Bearbeitet: Sept. 2, 2011, 2:12 am

I've read one Kerouac - On the Road, naturally - and I can't say I liked it at all. Maybe I was too old for it (I read it at the creakingly old age of 25 or so), maybe it was just the fact that his attitude towards women was that they were good for sex and washing his socks, and that was about it.

Turned me off the whole Beat ideal, which was a shame, I always wanted to wear a black turtleneck.

I'm still reading Small Wars by Sadie Jones, which is good, but it's been a slow reading week. (Cars keep on trying to commit hari-kiri under the wheels of the bus on my way home, so I'm mostly just staring out of the window in horrified shock, instead of reading my book. It's been a bad week for my bus drivers, but luckily the only thing that's actually suffered any damage is our nerves.)

15GeoffWyss
Sept. 2, 2011, 8:07 am

Y'all are making me sad about Kerouac--I last read On the Road at 20 or 21, and I've been thinking about picking it back up (at 43). But maybe not. . . .

Re: Ginsberg: Not being much of a reader of poetry, I don't have an informed opinion, but my poet friends mostly seem to think he did something important.

16iansales
Sept. 2, 2011, 10:01 am

I didn't like On the Road much - see here.

17CliffBurns
Sept. 2, 2011, 10:16 am

Sharp review. I absolutely concur.

18nymith
Sept. 2, 2011, 10:37 am

Ironically, all this conversation about the failings of Kerouac has made me put him higher on my list.

19CliffBurns
Sept. 2, 2011, 10:58 am

Just to prove us wrong? Now you're getting into the spirit!

20nymith
Sept. 2, 2011, 11:19 am

On the Road charts on practically every top 100 20th century book lists - not just American prints; Le Monde gave it credit. Then a bunch of snobs get to tell me it's not worth the acclaim. So I ask myself...

21inaudible
Sept. 2, 2011, 12:16 pm

The only thing that makes me want to read On the Road is that Pynchon deemed it worthy of writing an introduction.

22kswolff
Sept. 2, 2011, 2:20 pm

9: P.S. You and Karl are both Minnesota boys? Cool.

Born and raised in Wisconsin, now I'm stuck in temp purgatory in a "city" a little bigger than the Milwaukee suburb I grew up in. Luckily I've been to other states and realize there is more to Rochester than the Mayo Clinic, aka The Tyrell Corporation. Just don't tell the yokels that or it will burst their cult-like reverence for the place.

"Destinations" by Jan Morris is a great essay collection. Reading about South Africa in the mid-seventies. From what I've read the Tea Party doesn't resemble the Nazis -- an easy parallel for lazy pundit filth -- but Afrikaners, a tiny ruthless white minority whose entire philosophy is based on a puritanical Calvinist mysticism and brute military force. (Seriously, I can't be the only one who sees the commonality?)

Drive Me Out of My Mind by Chad Faries continues to be great. A memoir infused with an almost surrealist poetry.

23ajsomerset
Sept. 2, 2011, 4:57 pm

See, now I'm willing to forgive On the Road its sexism on the grounds that it's the work of a 20-something year old male of limited experience and maturity. It's the book's sense of its own importance that annoys me.

The mere fact that something happened is no reason to write it down, Jack.

24anna_in_pdx
Sept. 2, 2011, 5:19 pm

A lot of those guys were not exactly feminist. Look at Bukowski who's loved by practically everyone who's criticizing Kerouac. I read a poem of his recently where he was actually describing raping someone. He even used the word.

25ajsomerset
Sept. 2, 2011, 5:22 pm

Yes. Make that a 20-something yr-old male of limited experience and maturity who grew up in a particularly chauvinistic era.

It's like finding racism in an old book; you have to accept that it is there, and look past it for other values. But about the only other value I found in On the Road was Kerouac's energetic writing about jazz.

26kswolff
Sept. 3, 2011, 9:49 am

It's the book's sense of its own importance that annoys me.

Cue reference to Atlas Shrugged

Read Jan Morris's essay on Los Angeles. Excellent stuff.

27inaudible
Sept. 3, 2011, 12:33 pm

25> The depressing thing is how little the Beat guys understood about jazz. There's an infamous moment when Allen Ginsberg picked up a saxophone and blew a bunch of random notes then said "that's bebop!" or something, which is so insulting to actual bebop musicians. Ginsberg's comment captures pretty perfectly the paternalistic racism of the Beats; they saw black people as exciting/spontaneous/wild/'soulful'/etc but never as three dimensional human beings. Their racism prevented them from accepting how cerebral and intentional jazz music is.

28beardo
Sept. 3, 2011, 2:52 pm

For great Jazz writing see Whitney Balliett

an example below

http://www.monkzone.com/Balliet%20Obit.htm

29ajsomerset
Sept. 3, 2011, 3:39 pm

27: True. But they did understand that it was exciting. The achievement of Kerouac's jazz writing is to communicate that excitement.

30kswolff
Bearbeitet: Sept. 3, 2011, 4:20 pm

A little known Beat work that's worth mentioning is The Horn by John Clellon Holmes. Been a few years since I've read it, but it lacks the Canonical baggage of On the Road

Ginsberg's comment captures pretty perfectly the paternalistic racism of the Beats; they saw black people as exciting/spontaneous/wild/'soulful'/etc but never as three dimensional human beings. Their racism prevented them from accepting how cerebral and intentional jazz music is.

No wonder George Wallace wanted that Jewish homosexual Communist as a running mate! I hardly think Ginsberg is being racist, since he's using usually negative connotations ("Them nigras sure is musical and sexually promiscuous!") as positive affectations. And unlike the other whitebread cultural co-opters in the rock and roll industry, the Beats weren't doing it to capitalize on adolescent pop culture or make a damn buck off it. While the Beats were hardly a modicum of cultural sensitivity -- that would be the dogmatic self-righteous blowhards, aka the hippies -- they did have the bravery to thumb their nose as soul-numbing conformity in Eisenhower's America. Hats off to them for that. They were also First Amendment crusaders that opened up literature for more sexual explicitness and the four-letter words. America would be a chaste, dull, family-friendly abyss of mediocrity without them.

31nymith
Sept. 3, 2011, 6:09 pm

The best fictional writing on jazz I've read came at the end of James Baldwin's story Sonny's Blues.

Done with The Beast in the Jungle, and it became surprisingly moving during the final quarter, so it was worth the read. Next up, The Turn of the Screw. I may have to revise my opinion of Henry James

Also finished with Volume 1 of Les Miserables. Victor Hugo was not overstating it when he chose his title - it is the most emotionally punishing work of fiction i've yet read. Since the introduction of Jean Valjean it has been nothing but human misery, misplaced justice and thwarted attempts to attain peace. Looks like Waterloo is up ahead...

32inaudible
Sept. 3, 2011, 6:41 pm

30> That's the thing. Using racist stereotypes positively instead of pejoratively is the other side of the racist coin. It's liberal racism, and I think it's just as insidious. It's a nicer way of dehumanizing someone, which is why it's the form of racism that is still socially acceptable (and why it must be opposed when/wherever it appears).

33mejix
Sept. 3, 2011, 7:55 pm

Yesterday I finished The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. Brilliant.

Next week I think I am starting The Remains of the Day.

Today I will dip randomly on United States: Essays 1952-1992 by Gore Vidal.

34chamberk
Sept. 3, 2011, 11:22 pm

I'm about.... ten percent done with A Suitable Boy. There are a lot of characters to keep track of, but I'm enjoying it so far.

35June
Sept. 4, 2011, 7:53 am

I have been reading too much genre fiction so I set myself the task of reading some Booker winners/nominees. I really enjoyed Love and Summer by William Trevor, longlisted for the 2011 prize. The writing, of course, is beautiful and the plot is interesting without being heartrending. Then I reread Amsterdam by Ian McEwan. I have been interrupted by the arrival of a library reserve, The Cut by George Pelecanos, not a literary novel but a well-written mystery. I should be able to knock this one out in a day or so and then back to the Bookers.

36kswolff
Sept. 4, 2011, 6:47 pm

32: That's the thing. Using racist stereotypes positively instead of pejoratively is the other side of the racist coin. It's liberal racism, and I think it's just as insidious. It's a nicer way of dehumanizing someone, which is why it's the form of racism that is still socially acceptable (and why it must be opposed when/wherever it appears).

Mr. Show had a sketch just about this very subject:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cyJNOH8kX8

"Ewww, girl, ewww."
"Damn!"

37wookiebender
Sept. 4, 2011, 8:17 pm

#25> It's like finding racism in an old book; you have to accept that it is there, and look past it for other values.

Oh, I'm rather used to making excuses for the books I'm reading, I'm no stranger to the sudden shock of an attitude that is no longer acceptable in our society.

But that doesn't mean I have to *like* it, or even be nice about it.

I finished Small Wars and thought it was excellent. Well written, believable characters, fascinating piece of history I knew nothing about, and genuinely moving.

Have moved on to Packing for Mars, which is proving to be typical Mary Roach so far: lots of digressions, a breathless sense of wonder/fascination, but completely happy to take the mickey out of her subject (and herself).

38kswolff
Sept. 4, 2011, 9:32 pm

Oh, I'm rather used to making excuses for the books I'm reading, I'm no stranger to the sudden shock of an attitude that is no longer acceptable in our society.

But that doesn't mean I have to *like* it, or even be nice about it.


Couldn't agree more. When it comes to the writings of, say, Ezra Pound and Ferdinand Celine, the reader has to come to terms with their abhorrent anti-Semitism and Fascism. As a reader, I don't necessarily throw them out entirely, nor do I *like* in some idiotic fanboy way. I find literary appreciation far more complex and nuanced. Celine and Pound are writers I wrestle with, struggling to extract the Good from the mountainous sludge of bile and hate. But one can appreciate the writer but still say, "Despite your literary genius and reputation, you're so frikkin' wrong." Celine and Pound are one thing. Try taking that attitude with the slave-owning kleptocratic organized religion-hating Founding Fathers, especially in our loud, stupid, idiotic, hyperpoliticized, hyperpolarized society around Election Time.

39wookiebender
Sept. 4, 2011, 10:16 pm

Hm, I just realised what I wrote in #37 could be somewhat misconstrued (not that I think kswolff did, it's just that on re-reading...).

But that doesn't mean I have to *like* it, or even be nice about it.

The "it" in this does not refer to the attitude, but the *book* itself. Sometimes I can see beyond the attitude and still like the book; other times the attitude spoils the whole book, or is just something I latch onto as something specific to bitch about when the whole book annoys me.

(I doubt anyone here would expect me to like a racist/sexist/other-ist attitude, regardless of when it was written, but I thought I'd better make myself clear!)

40FlorenceArt
Sept. 5, 2011, 12:00 pm

As usual, I feel I'm reading the same book(s) I was reading last month, and the month before that...

Anyway, getting close to the end of A Game of Thrones. Haven't really made a start on Pantagruel. Snuck in a quickie in between more serious stuff last month: The Quiet Gentleman by Georgette Heyer, which was a bit disappointing but a nice distraction.

Aaaand... I finally managed to get my hands on an electronic copy of Infinite Jest. I had to create a fake identity to do it due to the fact that nobody can legally sell it to me since I don't live in an English-speaking country. I feel a bit like Arsène Lupin. Anyway, I'll start on it after I finish A Game of Thrones. Or should I concentrate on Pantagruel first?...

41CliffBurns
Sept. 5, 2011, 1:10 pm

PANTAGRUEL or INFINITE JEST? A good dilemma for a snob.

42CliffBurns
Sept. 5, 2011, 1:13 pm

I've just started THE ASTOUNDING, THE AMAZING AND THE UNKNOWN, which features pulp era SF writers combining to help defeat Nazi plans for a super-weapon. So far I'd say it's cute without being overly impressive. SF fans will get a kick out of it because it references Asimov, Heinlein et al, but whether or not it has cross-over appeal is less certain.

Still, I'm only 80 pages in so we'll see if it gets better.

43kswolff
Sept. 5, 2011, 4:55 pm

Pantagruel probably has more fart jokes.

The Long Night by Steve Wick is superb. Excellent especially in its depiction of William Shirer's dilemmas facing a journalist reporting inside a totalitarian state. And the history has a wonderful "you are there" quality.

44CliffBurns
Sept. 5, 2011, 9:21 pm

Finished THE ASTOUNDING, THE AMAZING AND THE UNKNOWN which got better as the storyline progressed and developed into a fun romp. Lots of in-jokes and allusions fans of the genre will love. A terrific way to spend an afternoon...

45justifiedsinner
Sept. 5, 2011, 9:32 pm

Just finished Three Men in a Boat and for a change of pace started All the Pretty Horses.

46inaudible
Sept. 5, 2011, 9:37 pm

40> How do the endnotes work in an electronic version? I'm 700 words into the print edition.

47cammykitty
Bearbeitet: Sept. 6, 2011, 11:02 pm

I'm a grrll from Minnesota too. Karl, you just missed me. A friend and I did our own "On the Road" with our Irish Water Spaniels. We went down to Rochester for your Irish Fest. The dogs lasted 15 minutes before the thunder started and their eyes got big and they said lets go home to Minneapolis!!!!!!! The dogs didn't like Rochester much, except for the lady by the Mayo who was missing her own dog and Culver's. The humans though thought your B&N was a pretty cool space.

I finished reading Cecilia Valdes or El Angel Hill today. Translation is clunky, but it is still obvious that this earned its reputation as a Cuban classic. It gives an excellent, detailed picture of Havana in the 1830s. My review is here: http://www.librarything.com/work/book/77570049 and I'm proud of it.

I'll be starting Beloved tonight or tomorrow. There's a group read through the 11 11 group. Feel free to join us here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/123246

48CliffBurns
Sept. 5, 2011, 10:10 pm

#45--from Jerome K. Jerome to Cormac McCarthy; that's one hell of a leap. Good luck.

49justifiedsinner
Sept. 6, 2011, 12:28 pm

To say nothing of the horse(s).

50nymith
Sept. 6, 2011, 5:49 pm

Done with To Say Nothing of the Dog, which made a nice homage to comfortable British reads. The characters were all somewhat flat, but charming. Thoroughly enjoyable yarn - no knowledge of Three Men in a Boat was really necessary, though it did spoil twists in The Moonstone and several Agatha Christie books. Not that I find that a loss.

Next up: Well, the same woman who gave me Travels in the Scriptorium also handed out a Wendall Berry novel, seeing I'd never heard of him. Since I really despised what I read of the Auster, I figure reading Andy Catlett should be next.

Ah heck, I'll read Endgame too.

51wookiebender
Sept. 6, 2011, 11:23 pm

Have finished Packing for Mars, which I enjoyed mightily. Obviously I am the sort of person who cannot know enough about pooing in zero G.

Moved onto my bookgroup read for this month, The Book of Emmett. Can't say the initial chapter grabbed me (I seem to have joined a group where we keep on choosing books about dysfunctional families, and I'm over dysfunctional families in my literature), but it's not too long so I'll keep at it.

52FlorenceArt
Sept. 7, 2011, 5:59 am

> 46: endnotes are one of the strong points of e-books in my opinion. They work as hyperlinks, and if the book is well designed there will be a link back to the main text, but otherwise I only need to press the back button. Much better than having to browse to the note and using two bookmarks to avoid spending hours flipping back and forth, and getting mixed up between note 26 of chapter 12 and the same note number in another chapter.

53kswolff
Sept. 7, 2011, 11:57 am

52: Flipping back and forth between pages in your book! Heavens to mergatroid! Your average beach-ball-shaped American would get winded doing that kind of activity. Now where's the remote control for my remote control?

http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-remote-control-can-be-operated-by-remote,16...

54chamberk
Sept. 7, 2011, 2:19 pm

It's not the difficulty of the task, it's how annoying it gets, especially with something like Infinite Jest where you're just flipping back and forth and back and forth most of the time you're reading.

LOVING A Suitable Boy, but I might just love extraneous detail and casts of hundreds a bit too much.

55anna_in_pdx
Sept. 7, 2011, 3:47 pm

54: Those who can get through IJ can definitely appreciate A Suitable Boy. I've read both and I love maximalism - can you tell? :)

I never figured out endnotes on my e-reader. Fortunately I read IJ the old fashioned way but I wasn't able to get them to work on my Nook version of the autobiography of Mark Twain and I was very disappointed.

56FlorenceArt
Sept. 8, 2011, 11:12 am

55: That's strange. Maybe the book was badly done and there were simply no links for end notes? That would be really lame, but I'm not ruling it out. Publishers have to re-learn how to publish books in e-form, and they are NOT doing a good job of it so far.

57inaudible
Sept. 8, 2011, 11:48 am

54> I love flipping back and forth.

58chamberk
Sept. 8, 2011, 2:26 pm

Hey, to each his or her own. I just used two bookmarks for IJ, honestly.

Considering either a reread of All Quiet on the Western Front (which I haven't touched since a WWI-literature paper in my senior year of college) or starting The Twenty-Seventh City (because I'm a completist and I've liked all the other Franzen I've read). And A Suitable Boy goes on... and on, and on...

59CliffBurns
Sept. 8, 2011, 2:38 pm

I can't read two books of fiction at the same time. A work of non-fiction in the morning, to get my brain warmed up, a novel or short story collection later on that day or just before bed.

60nymith
Sept. 8, 2011, 5:31 pm

Samuel Beckett's Endgame and Act Without Words, which was neither as funny nor as brutal as Godot. It was too short to have as much impact, though if Godot was in the spirit of a prison camp, Endgame was more like a nightmarish old-age home, with Clov as the caretaker and an apocalyptic event stranding them with ever-dwindling supplies. Grim stuff, but only a few moments were as harrowing and therefore as emotionally satisfying as Godot.

61wookiebender
Sept. 8, 2011, 8:02 pm

I've used two bookmarks many a time (for the character list in Anna Karenina, but mostly for notes), but I really prefer it when the footnotes are at the bottom of the page (so much easier to find!). But since that's mostly occurred in such books as Pratchett and Mary Roach (and The Annotated Alice), I'm assuming it's more of a humour thing.

Have decided that I don't want to read any more about alcoholic dysfunctional abusive families. Well written, but it wasn't bringing anything new to the field, so I got harsh. Not a genre I'm overly fond of in the first place.

Have picked up the silly and delightful A Mysterious Affair of Style by Gilbert Adair. I did like his previous The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, I thought it was a very nice homage to the golden age of British crime, with lots of metatextual jokes to keep me chuckling. Looks like this one's going to be pretty much the same good sort of read.

And not a single alcoholic in sight, although I must find out what a pink gin is.

62FlorenceArt
Sept. 9, 2011, 7:36 am

The two bookmarks work great when you read all the endnotes. But many books have a bunch of useless endnotes and I end up only looking them up if the text raises a question I want answered (which the endnote rarely does, to be honest), and in that case the endnotes bookmark is not very useful.

63kswolff
Sept. 9, 2011, 10:12 am

Finished The Long Night by Steve Wick Great stuff. Read like a taut thriller, which it sort of was, especially in the end chapters will William L. Shirer trying to figure out how to get the hell out of Nazi Germany in 1940.

60: Endgame isn't the best reading experience, I'll agree with that. But I would suggest the Beckett on Film adaptation, starring Michael Gambon and David Thelwis. Far funnier. "Endgame" is humorous in the way Ferdinand Celine is humorous: laughing at the sheer absurdity of it all. Furthermore, "Endgame" is like a wry commentary on "Godot" itself. Instead of two tramps stuck on a roadside, we have two misanthropes stuck in a room. Pozzo and Lucky are reduced to two stumps stuck in dustbins.

62: That all depends on the individual reader, the intended audience of the book, and the actual skill of the academic writing the endnotes. I've had experiences that range from enlightenment to a snide "Duh, I knew that." And endnotes to, say, Anna Karenina will be different to a green 19-year old college lit student or a jaded lit snob in their early 30s.

64anna_in_pdx
Sept. 9, 2011, 11:25 am

Started History, a novel by Elsa Morante. I also read the seventeenth Janet Evanovich yesterday at the gym. Why am I telling this group this???

65CliffBurns
Sept. 9, 2011, 11:29 am

Guilty pleasures, Anna. They get you every time.

With me, it's Lee Child's "Jack Reacher" novels.

Shall we form a support group?

66mejix
Sept. 9, 2011, 11:44 am

I find that checking the endnotes interrupts the flow of the text. When I am in the early stages of a book I might check the endnotes to see if they add anything. Most of the time I end up ignoring them, maybe browse them all together at the end of a chapter or when I'm done with the book. What I do also has to do with the size of the book and whether I am lying in bed or sitting while I read.

67anna_in_pdx
Sept. 9, 2011, 12:04 pm

65: I'd join that support group. I keep thinking she's going to have to stop the series, it's getting sillier and sillier, yet I keep reading them!

66: Yeah, it really depends on the book. I wish more books still had old style footnotes, actually. I prefer them to endnotes. Particularly if the book is huge and heavy. Reading in bed makes me less likely to look at an end note too. Sometimes I read them at the end of a chapter (for example in Penguin classics I often do that) and it works, because the footnotes are merely historical items of interest to the editors (not written by the authors) but with Infinite Jest the footnotes were authorial (is this the correct use of this term?), important, and added to the story.

68nymith
Sept. 9, 2011, 6:17 pm

63: I would argue that there's not much absurdity in Endgame, when all's said and done. The circular conversations, the gaps in logic, the non-sequiters, the asides, the incoherencies and the occasional snatches of some truth - the dialogue is realistic. Human relationships, with the second-guessing, the fault finding, the pointless malice, the mutual dependency, the routines which have become ritual... It seems that Beckett took some of the least admirable aspects of humanity and put them on show, the absurd functioning only as window-dressing.

I also found, in hindsight, that the ending of the play was rather hopeful. Life is spotted out the window and Clov is ready to leave when the curtain falls.

Thanks for mentioning Beckett on Film - I'll watch Endgame on YouTube and see what I think.

69alpin
Sept. 9, 2011, 8:08 pm

64: History: A Novel by Elsa Morante makes my list of most unforgettable novels. I seldom see reference to it; glad to see it's still being read. I always thought of it alongside the Sophia Loren movie "Two Women." I didn't discover until years later that the movie was based on a book by Morante's husband, Alberto Moravia and both books were inspired by their own experiences during the war.

70alpin
Sept. 9, 2011, 8:13 pm

Damn touchstone. How is it correct when typing but incorrect when posted? It's History by Elsa Morante.

71justifiedsinner
Sept. 10, 2011, 10:40 am

You have to pick the right one from the (other) alternatives that it lists sometimes it seems to pick the most obscure alternative.

72Harry_Vincent
Sept. 10, 2011, 3:21 pm

Finished Love, Poetry last night. Next on the reading pile--A Perfect Waiter.

73CliffBurns
Sept. 10, 2011, 3:24 pm

Nice to hear from you again, Harry.

74inaudible
Sept. 10, 2011, 9:14 pm

I finished Infinite Jest. Probably the bleakest novel I've ever read.

75CliffBurns
Sept. 10, 2011, 9:57 pm

I think you get some sort of pin or scroll for making it through. Congrats.

76inaudible
Sept. 10, 2011, 10:44 pm

2666 last year, Infinite Jest this year. Maybe Proust next year?

77kswolff
Sept. 11, 2011, 11:26 am

Or Richardson's Clarissa -- the longest novel in the English language at a whopping 1400 pages. Clarissa really does explain it all.

Started reading Fasting for Ramadan by Kazim Ali. Fascinating thus far, especially since I like reading Anthony Bourdain Reading about a month-long fast is quite a change. Also interesting from the perspective of an Indian-born Muslim working at a university in highly secular society.

78cammykitty
Sept. 11, 2011, 1:41 pm

I finished Beloved which is brilliant. I'm not going to write a review on it. I'm waiting for the others on the group read to catch up on me. I've got a burning desire to discuss the oral tradition!

I'll be reading my ER Bats sing, Mice giggle next. Speaking of, I heard the mice giggling in my garage. What to do??? It's just the garage.

79FlorenceArt
Sept. 11, 2011, 2:36 pm

I think mice should be allowed to giggle in the garage. Yes, definitely.

80cammykitty
Sept. 11, 2011, 3:10 pm

That's sort of what I was thinking. As long as they don't make a nest in something I actually use.

81FlorenceArt
Bearbeitet: Sept. 11, 2011, 3:18 pm

Like your car's engine... I tend to forget that a garage usually has a car in it.

82justifiedsinner
Sept. 11, 2011, 4:04 pm

#76 Proust took me 10 years. If you can do it in one you win both a medal and a trophy.

83cammykitty
Sept. 11, 2011, 5:34 pm

@81 That's sort of what I was thinking. A friend of mine looked under her hood once and found every nook not filled with car parts filled with sunflower seeds and hulls.

84ajsomerset
Sept. 11, 2011, 7:45 pm

Well, my dog went out today and made her first hunt, and we had lemongrass pheasant for supper. So this seems a good time to begin Jim Harrison's memoir, Off to the Side.

85wookiebender
Sept. 11, 2011, 8:33 pm

#63> And endnotes to, say, Anna Karenina will be different to a green 19-year old college lit student or a jaded lit snob in their early 30s.

Jaded? In your early 30s??? That does seem a bit early, to me.

Finished A Mysterious Affair of Style and it was fun and clever. Will track down the next book.

Speaking of guilty pleasures, I picked up Karin Slaughter's Blindsighted, hoping for a nice trashy guilty pleasure type read, only to have to physical restrain myself from throwing it across the room after a short while. (It's a library book, I'd hate to have to explain the damage to the librarians.) Revolting stuff.

Hey, that's two books this week that I've abandoned. Some sort of personal record, there.

So now am reading A Dry White Season, which is proving to be quite excellent so far.

86anna_in_pdx
Sept. 11, 2011, 8:42 pm

77: i just finally got Kazim Ali on Ramadan too. I was annoyed it didn't get here a long time ago so it could have accompanied me during Ramadan, which ended at the end of August.

87kswolff
Sept. 11, 2011, 10:30 pm

Jaded? In your early 30s??? That does seem a bit early, to me.

September 11th, Enron, Bernie Madoff, boy-raping priests, Abu Ghraib, bailouts, the Tea Party, and two sclerotic cash-hemorrhaging parties who haven't had a new idea since 1930 will do that to ya. Anyone who isn't cynical, jaded, or simply pissed off Ferdinand Celine-style at the state of affairs is either:

1. Asleep.
2. Mentally defective.
3. Or in on it.

86: I got the Kazim Ali this weekend. I also realized I didn't get it in time for Ramadan either. (While not a practicing Muslim, I would have liked to post a review during Ramadan, since the book is a wonderfully fast and casual read.) WTF, Tupelo Press?

On the other hand, I am enjoying it, even if I am in a state of apostasy. Nobody's perfect ;)

88wookiebender
Sept. 11, 2011, 10:42 pm

I agree that one can never be too young to be cynical, in this day and age.

But "jaded lit snob" to me implies that one is bored with literature. And I didn't think any of us had hit that, yet. (Bored with badly written, populist sh*t, sure. But with Anna Karenina...?)

89kswolff
Sept. 11, 2011, 11:01 pm

88: It was being bored and jaded in general, not with Anna Karenina. Although if you're a tenured lit scholar at an Ivy League university, you might get bored of it.

90chamberk
Sept. 12, 2011, 12:14 am

I really want to reread Anna K sometime soon... maybe after I finish Suitable Boy.

I read All Quiet on the Western Front this past Friday afternoon. Still as amazing as I remember it - I was inspired to track down some of Remarque's other, less available novels.

91wookiebender
Sept. 12, 2011, 1:57 am

#89> Yes, people keep on telling me that what I think of as "dream jobs"^ aren't actually all that fun. Phoooey to that.

^ Granted, I've worked in retail, I know that my "dream job" of working in a bookshop isn't going to be half as much fun as I wish it would be. Unless one is Bernard Black and mean to the customers. Which has an awful lot of appeal...

92cammykitty
Sept. 12, 2011, 2:53 am

Ah, working in a bookshop. I loved it until I got an EBD store manager... and realized how hard I was working for peanuts and that I didn't have time to read because I was at the store. The thing is, once you're out of the bookstore for awhile, long enough to recover from the urge to tidy any bookstore you enter, you start getting nostalgic for it again. I think I'd love to work for half-price books.

93iansales
Bearbeitet: Sept. 12, 2011, 7:13 am

Read SS-GB over the weekend. A surprisingly clumsily-written book. I remember Deighton's prose being more polished than this.

94kswolff
Sept. 12, 2011, 9:55 am

91: Be careful what you wish for. I had a "dream job", except it lacked in location, co-workers, etc. The only dreamy part was the job, everything that surrounded it ... less so. (I'm trying to be diplomatic here.)

93: Thanks for the early warning. I have SS-GB on my Wishlist. I'll approach with caution. Besides, isn't that a subtitle for a David Cameron campaign biography?

Hav continues to be wonderful. Science fiction doesn't always require space ships and little green men. It's like a not-necessarily-alternative history, providing a commentary on the ebbs and flows of history around the Mediterranean. Jan Morris makes Harry Turtledove look like an unimaginative hack.

95anna_in_pdx
Sept. 12, 2011, 11:42 am

We need a new thread on dream jobs. It is actually kind of a fun sounding topic.

96CliffBurns
Bearbeitet: Sept. 12, 2011, 2:58 pm

Christ, Sales, your reading tastes range farther afield than a monarch butterfly.

And I say that with all due respect.

I worked at a book store for 6 months. It should have been a dream job but for the two lasses running the place whose personalities were, ah, mercurial. Enjoyed my fellow staff members and most of the customers but the craziness eventually got to me and THAT's when I became a full-time writer.

97iansales
Bearbeitet: Sept. 12, 2011, 1:33 pm

Karl, I really enjoyed Hav as well.

Cliff, I used to like Deighton's novels - those trilogies he did with Bernard Samson weren't bad. And the Harry Palmer novels are quite good too.

98kswolff
Sept. 12, 2011, 2:43 pm

97: Slowly making my way through Hav Wonderful stuff.

99justifiedsinner
Sept. 12, 2011, 3:44 pm

I remember reading Only When I Larf years ago but I can't remember much about it. I also read a couple of the Harry Palmer books, although that name wasn't used in the books. I remember them being pretty good at the time.

100nymith
Sept. 13, 2011, 11:30 am

Rotten Rejections came into the house today, and I've already read most of it. A brief compendium of rejection letters from publishers to writers. The usual suspects are rounded up: Ulysses, Peyton Place, Swann's Way, etc. But who the HELL would turn down The Diary of Anne Frank?

A few choice quotes. "You're welcome to le Carre - he hasn't got any future." The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

"Good God, I can't publish this. We'd both be in jail." Faulkner's Sanctuary.

"Regret the American public is not interested in anything on China." The Good Earth.

And my favorite: "The author of this book is beyond psychiatric help." Crash by J.G. Ballard.

101kswolff
Sept. 13, 2011, 12:00 pm

100: The Dairy of Anne Frank lacked a "up" ending and a rousing climactic space battle with steampunk androids.

102chamberk
Sept. 13, 2011, 2:35 pm

That Sanctuary rejection makes me laugh. I'm not easily shocked while reading but Sanctuary did it.

Franzen's first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, is pretty decent. I can definitely see vague outlines in his characters in this book who would eventually evolve to be Berglunds or Lamberts in his later books. The story's a little ludicrous, but interesting in its ramifications. Maybe I'm an easily-led rube, but Franzen's books always leave me thinking about things bigger than the book itself.

103kswolff
Sept. 13, 2011, 2:37 pm

Coming this Fall, "The Diary of Android Frank."

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/pride-prejudice-zombies.php

104anna_in_pdx
Sept. 13, 2011, 2:37 pm

For the Ballard quote, that is true of many great authors, and so....? Their point being.....?

105nymith
Sept. 13, 2011, 3:23 pm

103: That's what really deserved the Ballard quote. The teen vampire genre is suddenly looking real good right now.

106nymith
Sept. 13, 2011, 6:06 pm

I've a penchant for books that can be read in one sitting, and have killed half an hour on many a strange volume - Creatures in an Alphabet, Bozo the Woodchuck, The Bottle Imp and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, for example. Today's addition to the stack was Isaac Asimov's Space Dictionary. I found out that Russian astronauts are/were called cosmonauts. My, my. How interesting.

107cammykitty
Sept. 14, 2011, 12:10 am

@103 Very scary - funny, if I didn't think they've actually published those books at well. BTW, Quirk are the people who also brought us Mrs. Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children unless I'm mistaken.

108CliffBurns
Sept. 14, 2011, 9:11 am

"Mrs. Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children"

That's one I was planning on picking up for a young adult gal I know. Is it worthy?

109kswolff
Sept. 14, 2011, 11:57 am

Finished Fasting for Ramadan by Kazim Ali. A quickie read, full of poetic insight.

110cammykitty
Sept. 15, 2011, 12:51 am

108 A lot of people I respect loved it, but I personally was disappointed. I'd call it "horror lite." You know from the start it will never get too nasty. The biggest flaw in it though was pacing. It started off slowly, and then came to a sort of conclusion about 30 pages from the end. Then it went into overdrive setting up the opening for the next book. I felt like it never had a proper wrap up, and I hate being suckered into a series so I didn't appreciate that ending at all. Especially since it wasn't marketed as first in a series.

111kswolff
Sept. 15, 2011, 12:25 pm

Got Notes From Irrelevance by Anselm Berrigan, the son of Tom Berrigan Structurally, it is a book-length single stanza. Ideally, I'd like to read it in one sitting, since it is only 64 pages. Plus reviewing poetry gives me a new challenge.

112nymith
Sept. 16, 2011, 10:15 am

Finished The Portable Beat Reader, which has been quite an education. Some of it was solid gold and some of it was interminable, but that's the way of all compilations. I got about 8-10 interesting authors out of its pages, so I think the time was well spent, and I must say I enjoyed The White Negro far more than I'd expected to, since I heartily dislike Mailer as a person and his argument was...shall we say flawed? Man, he could write though.

113cammykitty
Sept. 16, 2011, 4:48 pm

112 I can't read Mailer. I read one novel in college and couldn't stand it. Then I read Silences by Tillie Olsen, and her quote of his just finished him off as far as I was concerned.

As for The Portable Beat Reader, sounds like it was faithful to the movement -- which was also partly solid gold and partly interminable!

114CliffBurns
Sept. 16, 2011, 5:17 pm

Mailer's THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG is a monumental work. But I think he's one of those DWAs (dead white authors) whose canon won't age well.

115chamberk
Sept. 16, 2011, 5:45 pm

Yeah, Executioner's Song was really good - hefty, though.

Taking a break from fiction with AJ Jacobs's The Know-It-All. Fun light reading, perfect for toilet reading.

116FlorenceArt
Sept. 17, 2011, 2:37 am

Started Infinite Jest and I'm liking it so far. But I am puzzled, when was this written? The copyright suggests 1996, but the technology (I assume it's supposed to be set in the future) is puzzling. Teleputers? Entertainment cartridges? E-notes? I guess 1996 is longer ago than it feels to me.

117bencritchley
Sept. 17, 2011, 8:28 am

Mr Weston's Good Wine was brilliant. I also greatly enjoyed Ash on a Young Man's Sleeve, which although purporting to autobiographical is really a portrait of Abse's childhood friend Keith.
I'm beginning Chinaman because I was seduced by the talk on the dustjacket of it being 'the great Sri Lankan Novel.'
I seem to enjoy most of what I read, I'm not sure if that means I have low standards, or good taste or am terribly unadventurous in my choices.

118cammykitty
Sept. 17, 2011, 10:14 am

Finished Bats Sing, Mice Giggle and wrote my 1 star review here: http://www.librarything.com/work/8907597/book/77954884 When it got to an experiment I'd seen on In Search Of (remember Mr. Spock's science show?), I couldn't take the book seriously any more.

It's "Hispanic Heritage Month" from 9-15 to 10-15. My school has moved it to May I believe, but I'll still honor it now. I'm going to focus on books by/about Latinos starting with a YA novel, The Killer's Tears. It should be a good 4 week period. You can hardly call it a month. ;)

119drmamm
Sept. 17, 2011, 3:39 pm

120mejix
Sept. 17, 2011, 4:16 pm

The Lover by Marguerite Duras. So world-weary, so tough, so French. Liking it.

121kswolff
Sept. 17, 2011, 4:41 pm

120: I would also recommend the film version.

122mejix
Sept. 17, 2011, 6:45 pm

I saw that eons ago. Can't remember much though. Probably will check it out again. Thanks.

123CliffBurns
Sept. 17, 2011, 8:53 pm

#119 Good space epic. Sequel just got released this month.

124FlorenceArt
Sept. 18, 2011, 1:19 am

120> No idea how French it is, but I loved it when I read it, years and years ago. Come to think of it, it's been years since I have read any Duras. She wrote beautifully. I'm sure there are a dozen of her books I haven't read, I should go find one.

Never thought of her as world weary and tough though... But maybe I can see what you mean...

125cammykitty
Sept. 18, 2011, 6:32 am

120 &124 - never read the book, but the movie was world weary and tough... although sometimes movies only share titles with their origin once the screenwriter is done.

I finished The Killer's Tears. Meh. Maybe okay for a YA book, but I didn't trust it. Oversimplified. So now I'm on to Latin American Folktales: Stories from Hispanic and Indian Traditions by John Bierhorst and Nine Centuries of Spanish Literature : Nueve siglos de literatura española : A Dual-Language Anthology by Seymour Resnick.

126mejix
Sept. 18, 2011, 11:36 am

>FlorenceArt, Cammykitty
The narrator lived her childhood in poverty and is supposed to be very unsentimental during her first relationship. The thing that I find amusing is how in some of these novels they love sounding jaded and unsentimental. Its like a pose, a bit theatrical. Maybe it was a post-war thing or a generational thing. I don't know.

127cammykitty
Sept. 18, 2011, 2:54 pm

126 It is kind of a noir theme too. Hmmm... I'll think on that for awhile.

128wookiebender
Sept. 18, 2011, 7:38 pm

Been a while since I popped into this thread.

A Dry White Season was a great account of an ordinary man trying to seek justice in a corrupt society. I'm still pondering it.

Locke & Key: Head Games and Locke & Key: Crown of Shadows were gorgeously illustrated graphic novels, written by Joe Hill. I rather like the creepiness of them, but a friend of mine who knows horror (it's a genre I mostly avoid) is quite sniffy about Hill's horror. Anyway, I like the idea he's come up with, I'm scared for the characters, and it's a gorgeous book to read.

Then The Sense of an Ending, which seems to be the front runner for the Booker this year (after all other serious competition was nobbled after not being nominated or shortlisted). If it wins, I will be happy, it was a fascinating book, about memory, history, and the wobbliness of both. One of the rare books that I went back to re-read sections after finishing it. Again, I am still pondering some of the implications of the ending.

And now I'm reading In Other Rooms, Other Wonders which I am liking so far.

129ajsomerset
Sept. 18, 2011, 11:11 pm

One of the 18 or 20 things I'm trying to read at once is Ray Robertson's new book, Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live.

130RebeccaAnn
Sept. 19, 2011, 12:36 am

Reading The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende for a grad school class. I'm very much enjoying it, I just wish I didn't have to rush through it. I think it'd be a great novel to savor. The detail is astoundingly rich.

Almost finished with Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino. A few stories in it weren't really my thing, but overall, the book is a win (as usual when it comes to Calvino).

And I just got some discounted Dalkey Archive books in from Symposium Books. I'll probably start The Inquisitory by Robert Pinget once I've finished Cosmicomics.

Funny. I'm not reading anything originally written in English. Hm...

131FlorenceArt
Sept. 19, 2011, 3:57 am

Actually, I had a look at Duras's works on Amazon and LT, and I don't think I read The Lover. I read The Sea Wall, plus one or two other books by her. Not enough, I need to add more to my wish-list.

132KayEluned
Sept. 19, 2011, 5:49 am

In an attempt to read as many previous winners of the Carnegie Medal for Children's Literature I am re-reading Berlie Doherty's Dear Nobody which I read first when I was about 13. It is a good concept there is no doubt and it certainly did it's job of making me think about teenage pregnancy when I first read it, but to be honest I am finding it a little lacking in the re-read. In fact I am surprised it won the medal and can't help but wonder if it was because back in the early nineties it was considered shocking for a children's book to deal with an issue such as this.

133GeoffWyss
Sept. 19, 2011, 8:53 am

Dan Hoyt's Then We Saw the Flames, short stories.

134chamberk
Bearbeitet: Sept. 19, 2011, 1:21 pm

130: Good to hear House of the Spirits is a good one, I've had it for a while. It's floating near the top of my to-read pile... I just can't shake the suspicion that it'll be a 100 years of solitude ripoff...

135FlorenceArt
Sept. 19, 2011, 1:33 pm

Infinite Jest is starting to look like a roller-coaster. The first two chapter were powerful though I felt the writing could be better, but they really moved me. The third seems to be an acutely boring description of drug consumption habits on a campus, complete with a list of drug names in the end notes. I think I might stop bothering with the end notes, they break the rhythm (whatever there is) for no good reason. And frankly if the book had started with this chapter, I'd have stopped bothering with it too. We'll see...

136RebeccaAnn
Sept. 19, 2011, 1:34 pm

134: It starts off similar to One Hundred Years of Solitude. Having read that just previous, my first thought was "this is the exact same thing." But it's really not. It's much more of a traditional narrative (more plot focused with a less grandiose scope), with minimal magic in the magical realism. It's also much more realistic and focuses on far fewer characters. There's a heavy emphasis on politics, which I didn't get as much when I read Marquez. So similar, but not the same. I wouldn't call it a ripoff :)

137GeoffWyss
Sept. 19, 2011, 2:52 pm

135: The one endnote you don't want to skip is the filmography (of what or whom, I don't remember)--funny stuff

138FlorenceArt
Sept. 20, 2011, 5:39 am

137: OK, thanks, I'll try not to miss it!

139kswolff
Sept. 21, 2011, 8:52 pm

Finished the "Letters from Hav" portion of Hav Now onto "Hav among the Myrmidons."

140wookiebender
Sept. 21, 2011, 9:03 pm

I'm about to finish In Other Rooms, Other Wonders which I've enjoyed very much, although I was expecting more intertwining and overlapping rather than just all the stories having K.K. Harouni as a common character.

I've got a long weekend away coming up sans children, and it's with my Mum, sister, and niece, all of whom are avid readers. I am having conniptions over what books to bring with me. I'm not sure how much reading time has been planned for, but I'm in charge of ferreting out details on the bookshops we want to visit.

141CliffBurns
Sept. 21, 2011, 9:04 pm

Indulge yourself!

142wookiebender
Sept. 21, 2011, 9:46 pm

Well, so far we have planned:

* Seeing the Klimt exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria: http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/exhibitions/vienna,-art-and-desig...
* Seeing the King Tutankhamun exhibition at the Museum: http://kingtutmelbourne.com.au/
* Dinner at Vue de Monde: http://www.vuedemonde.com.au/ (hm, looks like they've got several incarnations; knowing Mum we'll be on level 55 of the Rialto)

And we're staying somewhere unbelievably swish, but I can't remember the name of the hotel.

This is how my sister travels (the hotel) and how my mother eats (the restaurant). If I were planning it, I'd be sleeping in my friend's spare room and eating pizza. :)

We don't want to cram too much in (Mum's still in recovery from chemo; this was all planned about a year ago but was scuppered by her illness, now we're going in celebration). So I'm limiting myself to two bookshops:

* Readings in Carlton, which is an excellent independent shop; last time I was there I walked out with far too many books: http://www.readings.com.au/
* Embiggen Books in the CBD, which has gotten a fair amount of attention as opening as a new specialty science bookshop at a time when other bookshops are closing (sadly, Reader's Feast, which I would have liked to visit as well): http://embiggenbooks.com/

We're all science-y/medical people, so that's definitely on our radar.

And, if I can corrupt my niece briefly, a quick pit stop to Minotaur to look at the sci-fi, comics and collectibles: http://www.minotaur.com.au/

143CliffBurns
Sept. 21, 2011, 11:16 pm

All I can say is: WOW.

144wookiebender
Sept. 21, 2011, 11:46 pm

And is it totally nerdy of me to be most excited by Embiggen Books? Best. Bookshop. Name. Ever. (Apart from my local independent in Sydney, Better Read Than Dead.) And I love the idea of lots of science books crammed into the one shop.

Although the restaurant should be pretty bloody brilliant as well. Hope I can scrub up well enough for that night! Melbourne is much sniffier about standards than Sydney. (I can wear jeans to the Opera in Sydney, and have done so many times. But to not dress up for a restaurant in Melbourne seems tantamount to spitting in the sommelier's eye.)

145chamberk
Sept. 22, 2011, 12:01 pm

A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man, as they say...

146justifiedsinner
Sept. 22, 2011, 2:44 pm

I think embiggens is a rap star.

147GeoffWyss
Sept. 22, 2011, 3:28 pm

The article "Radisson Confidential" by Jonathan Lethem, in this month's Harper's, might be of interest to those of you who write and read science fiction. It's about Lethem's time at sci-fi conventions + sci-fi authors and audiences.

148CliffBurns
Sept. 22, 2011, 4:58 pm

Any link to the Lethem article--or is it a pay-per-view?

149GeoffWyss
Sept. 22, 2011, 7:08 pm

I'm afraid Harper's is pretty close-fisted. There's a PDF on the website, but it's too small to read, and when you click on it, you get subscription info. It would probably be worth the 3 or 4 bucks to get it at the newsstand. (A paper subscription, at least here in the States, is the best deal going--something like $12 a year. It's a magazine I think most of the snobs would like.)

150CliffBurns
Sept. 22, 2011, 7:51 pm

Yeah, I like Harper's and Atlantic Monthly. Usually have something worthwhile. I think they have Harper's at the local library. Will check it out. The latest Scientific American (on cities of the future) is another one I'd like to lay my mitts on.

151justifiedsinner
Sept. 23, 2011, 10:49 am

That was a good SciAm edition. Nothing earth shattering but since I was reading it at the same time as Gwynne Dyer's Climate Wars it did a bit to relieve the gloom.

152kswolff
Sept. 23, 2011, 4:34 pm

Hav continues to be fun.

153nymith
Sept. 25, 2011, 3:26 pm

Most of my reading time is being spent on Stand Still Like the Hummingbird. When a book that speaks to me that thoroughly comes along, all else just ceases to hold my attention.

154kswolff
Sept. 25, 2011, 4:37 pm

The Pleasure of the Text by Barthes was short, brilliant, and delightful ... and a pleasure to read.

155Lcanon
Sept. 26, 2011, 4:19 pm

I read General of a Dead Army over the weekend after finding it on sale (for 1.99) on Kindle. Then realized I'd gotten Ismail Kadare mixed up with Imre Kertesz. But I enjoyed it. Never read an Albanian novel before and I was fascinated at how modern (for 1963) Tirana was made to seem.

156alpin
Sept. 26, 2011, 5:05 pm

Finished Christopher Hitchens's memoir Hitch-22. Verbose, bombastic, never dull. His political evolution -- from "international socialist" to a supporter of the invasion of Iraq and associate (fan?) of Paul Wolfowitz -- is particularly interesting (and a few other adjectives).

Starting Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes.

157mejix
Sept. 26, 2011, 9:57 pm

These days I'm reading really short works or books that I've bought at the thrift shop and never read. Today I started The Sagas of the Icelanders. I am hoping to dip into them periodically.

158nymith
Sept. 27, 2011, 10:58 am

Finished Francis Bacon's Essays. Pretty much dull. An Elizabethan businessman gives his opinion on Elizabethan business, when not detailing his dream house and garden (to be built and maintained by the servants, of course). The garden was a disappointment - all frills and flowers and scents, not a vegetable to be seen.

Best essay was Of Studies. "Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider."

On a wildly different note, started reading Story of O, a French sex-cult erotica classic. Having never read erotica before, I'm curious to see if this kind of stuff has any literary merit.

159CliffBurns
Sept. 27, 2011, 6:35 pm

Finished two short story collections: Elmore Leonard's WHEN THE WOMEN COME OUT TO DANCE and Donald Ray Pollock's KNOCKEMSTIFF.

The latter is amazingly good, harrowing stories of white trash citizens on the verge of obsolescence, determined to go down drinking, fighting and screwing their cousins. Linked short stories, not a weak tale in the 18 that make up the collection. Highest recommendation.

From the short story "I Start Over" by Donald Ray Pollock: "I'm beginning to believe that anything I do to extend my life is just going to be outweighed by the agony of living it."

160CliffBurns
Sept. 27, 2011, 6:56 pm

#158 The historian J.E. Neale wrote of Francis Bacon: "His mind soared into the heavens, but his feet were of clay."

161nymith
Sept. 27, 2011, 8:16 pm

Amen to that. I've got to read his New Atlantis next. Since it's a short, running narrative, I'm hoping I'll find it a better read, with a little more of that "soaring to the heavens." It's a utopian tract, so it had better soar.

162wookiebender
Sept. 27, 2011, 10:23 pm

Well, very little reading done in Melbourne over the weekend (see #142 above). I got through maybe two chapters of Death at La Fenice, the first in a rather charming murder mystery series set in Venice. Good fun stuff, although not really snobbish.

And, I missed BOTH bookshops I wanted to go to! We skipped Readings, as we were running short on time and reasoned that good independent bookshops also exist in Sydney. But when we got to Embiggened, it was closed due to flooding! (No mention on their website, but I did find mention of it on their FaceBook page once I was back in Sydney.) Since this was the bit I was MOST looking forward to and my plan was scuppered, no one minded walking several blocks to Wunderkammer, a science shop, filled with all manner of weird stuff like artificial limbs, skeletons, stuffed animals, globes, books, toys, rocks, etc. I scored a very nice periodic table, which now needs to find a place on our walls. (I managed to almost leave it behind in the airport heading back to Sydney, and when I ran back for it, worrying about how I'd explain it to the security people who were sure to have surrounded it with bomb detecting devices, it was just there where I'd left it without a single worried looking person screaming "unattended baggage!". Phew.)

And, because I had to sneak off to sneakily buy a present for my niece while her back was turned, I just happened to pop into Minotaur on my way back from that errand. Very short on time, so just a quick snaffling of a book from the shelves (Flowers for Algernon, which I've never read but has been in my mind of late), a graphic novel from the comic shelves (volume 3 of Unwritten), and a quick grab of some Doctor Who collectibles.

My feet were KILLING me by the end of the weekend. Next time, I'm going to insist on some more downtime for reading!

163iansales
Sept. 28, 2011, 2:31 am

Currently reading A Quiet Flame, the first Bernie Gunther novel set in Argentina. One of the plot-threads is set in in Berlin in 1932 as the Nazis rose to power. Nasty stuff. Gunther feels more like a noir wise-cracking PI than I remember him from earlier novels.

164TJH1966
Bearbeitet: Sept. 28, 2011, 2:24 pm

#159: Knockemstiff was my kind of story collection. Pollock has also published a novel, The Devil All the Time.

Have you read I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down by William Gay? It kicks ass as well.

165CliffBurns
Sept. 28, 2011, 2:45 pm

I've read another William Gay offering (not that one), it's downstairs somewhere. A Cormac McCarthy-esque manhunt. Pretty good stuff.

I have the Pollock novel on order from my library. The short story collection was one of the best things I've read this year.

166TJH1966
Sept. 29, 2011, 1:16 am

I keep forgetting my local library has The Devil All the Time and now it's checked out. I Hate to See that Evening Sun Go Down is a great short story collection, but I'm a William Gay fan. Another fine short story collection is Poachers by Tom Franklin. And while I'm on short story collections, Welding with Children and Same Place, Same Things by Tim Gautreaux. I'll stop now.

And this;"William Gay reading at the 2010 Clarksville Writers Conference"

http://youtu.be/iL-jcarCyFE

167wookiebender
Sept. 29, 2011, 3:09 am

Finished Death at La Fenice which was a charming, if not particularly snobbish, read. Have moved on to Being Dead by Jim Crace.

Hm. Bit of a preoccupation with death in the titles this week!

168CliffBurns
Sept. 29, 2011, 9:35 am

It's TWILIGHT by Gay that I have downstairs--and I remember quite liking it.

I've also read the POACHERS collection, which was superb.

169anna_in_pdx
Sept. 29, 2011, 11:31 am

I am breaking my heart over History: A novel. I don't know if I have the stomach to read anything else by Morante. It's too real and too sad!

Planning to start the Magic Mountain in October with my LT reading group.

170mejix
Bearbeitet: Sept. 29, 2011, 12:48 pm

Ooooh I want to read The Magic Mountain. I thought I was going to read it this summer. At the rate I'm going I don't think I'll get to it by October.

171KatrinkaV
Sept. 30, 2011, 8:37 am

Just finished Robbe-Grillet's The Erasers, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I've now started on Paul Goodman's The Empire City.

172CliffBurns
Sept. 30, 2011, 9:34 am

I was interested in THE ERASERS when I was working on my detective novels a couple of years ago--never managed to nab a copy though. I'll have to re-add it to my list...

173kswolff
Sept. 30, 2011, 10:13 am

Reading passages from The Manson File Chilling and compelling by turns.

174GeoffWyss
Sept. 30, 2011, 4:11 pm

Anna, The Magic Mountain is one of my favorite.

175kswolff
Sept. 30, 2011, 5:04 pm

Finished Hav by Jan Morris. Stellar!

176FlorenceArt
Sept. 30, 2011, 5:29 pm

Infinite Jest may be the most annoying book I have ever tried to read. Pages and pages and pages of not especially interesting, sloppily written and apparently never edited English, interspersed with some butchered French (thankfully my German is too rusty to notice if it is being similarly mangled), and just when I'm about to give up on the book, suddenly out of nowhere comes this very short flash of pure poetry. And then the cycle starts again.

So what's the story about this book? Did the author die before it was finished or at least edited? Or was there an editors' strike the year it came out?

177anna_in_pdx
Sept. 30, 2011, 5:40 pm

176: But, I loved it! The stupid schoolboy french is supposed to be like that! And the endnotes are fun, and the chaos is fun. I guess if you like a linear narrative you would not like it at all... but what I suggest is, try reading it while assuming that everything you are remarking on was done *intentionally* to create an effect.

(The author survived this book by about 10 years, I think. I am currently reading the posthumously published Pale King and I think it's harder to get into than Infinite Jest.)

178FlorenceArt
Okt. 1, 2011, 1:51 am

177: I have no problem with the story, it's the writing that gets to me. Except for these very rare flashes of poetry, it's clumsy ans sloppy and it grates on me in hundreds of small ways. And now that I know it's supposed to be deliberate, it will probably make me angry instead of just annoying me.

Well of course, I suppose the lack of a discernible story doesn't help either. If the story was a simple one that carried me, I might live with the writing, but then it would be just one of the thousands of OK but certainly not snobbish books that get published each year.

In short, I don't think this is an author for me. I don't mind intricate and confusing stories, but that's because I just ignore them. I can enjoy a book I don't understand, in fact I very often do, but it has to carry me away with language. This one doesn't. It keeps nagging at me, and I'm not sure two or three beautiful sentences every hundred of pages or so are enough to justify the tediousness of this.

179littlegeek
Okt. 1, 2011, 5:55 pm

Wow, I loved IJ, hung on every word. To each hir own.

180FlorenceArt
Okt. 2, 2011, 5:25 am

179: Indeed. I have to admit I may be a bit unusual in what makes me love a book or hate it. I don't pay much attention to the plot, and I tend to forget it as I go along, so that even the most simple and straitforward stories can leave me slightly confused. I think the main two things that make a book for me are the language, and people that I can connect with.

In the case of Infinite Jest, as I already said, the language grates on me. This didn't matter too much in the first two chapters, because the rythm and energy of the narration were enough to carry me, and I could relate to the characters. I liked these first two chapters a lot, but since then I'm struggling, and the mangled French in the current chapter feels like the last straw. English is not my mother tongue, so I don't mind awkward sentences or incorrect syntax too much, but I am much less forgiving with French.

I'm not giving up on it though, not yet, but I don't know if I'll manage to finish it.

181kswolff
Okt. 2, 2011, 12:13 pm

180: Well, to each his or her own, as it were. I loved IJ and rather detest Hemingway "Drinking and manliness and terse sentences. Really? Should I care?" If you hate IJ, you should read Beckett's How It Is It has a plot and characters, but Beckett's trademark bleak minimalism has whittled narrative structure down to a skeleton, and by this time in his career, he's whittling the skeleton down into handheld bone-shards.

182KatrinkaV
Okt. 3, 2011, 2:11 pm

I, too, absolutely loved Infinite Jest; making connections to something read 100 pages previously, experiencing those "a-ha!" discoveries: it all seemed like contemporary Dickens on speed. It's one of those books I imagine you uncover something new each time you read it.

183anna_in_pdx
Okt. 3, 2011, 3:47 pm

180: I would put it down if it were that frustrating. There are so many other books out there!

I wondered at the time if it were for everyone, and while reading the hilariously butchered French I was actually wondering how it would seem to a native speaker. I guess it is not pleasant... Hmmm. I've also hesitated to recommend it to some friends and relatives even though I loved it, because it is very dense and the writing is very, well, weird with all the "and but so" kind of stuff and the endnotes are sometimes a little daunting.

184FlorenceArt
Okt. 4, 2011, 6:23 am

I think I'll probably finish it, but it is frustrating, and frankly I'm afraid most of the humor is lost on me. It makes me smile sometimes, but never laugh. The writing is in turn exhilarating, OK, boring, or full of infuriating little mistakes. If it becomes too much, I'll put it down, but I'm not there yet.

185kswolff
Okt. 4, 2011, 9:59 am

184: Isn't there a translation in your native language? One would think with IJ's popularity.

186FlorenceArt
Okt. 5, 2011, 9:40 am

185: I'm sure there is. I usually avoid translations from English, because I can read the original text and because I hate translation errors, but in this case maybe it was a mistake. I wonder how the translator managed the "French" parts of the book... and the fake French "accent" of the Canadians...

187kswolff
Okt. 5, 2011, 11:43 am

Nearly done with Bones Beneath Our Feet After that, I'm planning to read The Dark Labyrinth by this Durrell character everyone is going on about.

188RODNEYP
Dez. 2, 2021, 3:48 pm

189RODNEYP
Dez. 2, 2021, 4:05 pm

>20 nymith: There you go. I concur. I'm a big snob but not on this one