Spring is sprung in 2015: What Are You Reading, Vernally Speaking?

read "no good men among the living", which was astonishing. before that patrick cockburn's book on ISIS, which was good but sorely needing a good edit. now onto rory stewart's book about walking from herat to kabul

Thomas Hardy - A Pair of Blue Eyes

esp. if you like piss-takes of literary types

Oh yes. Ta.

hi everyone -

can anyone recommend some good fiction that is set in Guatemala?

thanks in advance,

gr8080

and yes i found this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Novels_set_in_Guatemala

looking for a pr0-tip

I have been wanting to read Senselessness by Castellanos Moya for a good long while now.

Finished Saer's La Grande last weekend. Probably the best writer to have ever emulated those naturalistic Proustian sentences (I doubt many have tried tbh) and there is a weird effect of having explicit sexual encounters written about in those Proustian paragraphs (where Proust used those blocks of writing to hide himself Saer's characters are naked physically and emotionally too). Equally though Bolano isn't such a lone-ish figure (La Grande is Saer's last bk from 2005), both talk about dictatorships and their meddling in literary circles (via shadowy 'failed' poets), there is no magical realism to disguise anything either. Although Saer doesn't make use of pulp-ish writing in the way Bolano might. At times I would like to read less about lives destroyed by those dictatorships but it is such a part of those writerly lives that as soon as I write this it becomes a rubbish thing to say.

All Dogs are Blue by Rodrigo de Souza Leão is short but inevitably intense and comical sets of scenes in an asylum (where Rodrigo was confined by his family). No issues like those in Wild Man Fischer (say). It is touching how literature is almost his only, best friend - Rimbaud especially. So I turned to reading him this week.

|||||||| u may also like 'an unexpected light' (unless you've had enough afghanistan)

I just returned from a brief camping trip, during which I finished reading Washington Square. It was very much like a Jane Austen novel condensed to novella length and pretty damned brilliant in its execution. Now I am reading Cannery Row.

I have been wanting to read Senselessness by Castellanos Moya for a good long while now.

i've read this. it's awesome

Solstice getting near. About time for ILB to break out its ice cream suit and start a new summer reading thread.

for a little while when i was a kid i would reread the susan cooper books at every solstice

Do your final dance around the maypole because Sumer Is Icumen In 2015, What Are You Reading Now?