Now Is The Winter Of Our Dusty-dusty 2015/2016, What Are You Reading Now?

Jon Savage's book on the Kinks is pretty good for an official bio; they prob turn up in his collected reviews etc. too.

I've laid aside the Isaac Bashevis Singer short stories for now. There's some remarkable stuff in there and a large part of its value rests in being an acutely observed compendium of Ashkenazy jewish culture in the 20th century.

Now I am reading Netta Larsen's short novel, Passing, that regards two main women characters who are African Americans in the 1920s, but light-skinned enough to 'pass' for white. One chooses to 'pass' and the other doesn't, although she happily takes advantage of her ability to move about much more freely in society than if she were dark-skinned.

What's the Gracq like? I've read a couple of novellas by him, liked them a lot.

i've never read any of his fiction. it seems like an ideal book of criticism to me, it's basically only about canonical works or authors, it views/organizes most things through general reflections on broad literary phenomena (chapters called 'reading', 'writing', 'the novel', comparison to cinema, etc.), but it's written in catches and turns, so that he rarely seems to be trying to make a point, just to state long-considered reflections. his judgments always sound assured, and he has an insider's perspective on career/craft development, but a non-literary-world-game-player's amateur perspective on reading for pleasure and private satisfactions. it seems quite french (and the works mentioned are predominantly french). i read it whenever i want to recompose my mind, it's so measured and well-wrought.

that sounds great!

Dave Hutchinson: Europe at Midnight -- really good, just my cup of tea: like Alan Furst writing SF about topology/maps/borders/parallel universes
Diane Williams: Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine -- intensely irritating, a sort of platonic ideal of the worst of the McSweeney's aesthetic
Amelie Nothomb: Sulphuric Acid -- concentration death camps as reality TV - fairly entertaining but I don't believe a word of it

Actually, having read some more of it, Amelie Nothomb: Sulphuric Acid has turned out to be facile crap.

i don't know helen macdonald but her most recent book made some year-end lists and i LOVE that she mentions sylvia townsend warner in the new york times in 2016 so i'm a new fan of hers. also she says she likes sci-fi. dunno if i really want to read her hawk memoir but people say its great.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/books/review/helen-macdonald-by-the-book.html?hpw&rref=books&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well

also, i like that her hawk memoir was partially inspired by henry green.

also, she was the coolest kid reader:

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

I was an obsessive reader, the kind of child who’d read the back of the cereal packet six times over breakfast. My favorites were Gerald Durrell, Willard Price, John Masefield and two books about schoolboys running away to live feral in the woods: “Brendon Chase,” by “B.B.,” and “My Side of the Mountain,” by Jean Craighead George. Susan Cooper’s “Dark Is Rising” sequence and Ursula Le Guin’s “Earthsea Quartet” were the best of all.

i guess i really have to read wolf hall, huh? i mean you don't have to hit me over the head a million times. i can't keep seeing people mentioning that book all the time and not be curious. just doesn't SEEM like something i would ordinarily read.

George MacDonald - The Princess and the Goblin
Gabriella Ambrosio - Before We Say Goodbye
Ishmael Beah - A Long Way Gone
Guillermo Verdecchia - Fronteras Americanas

A Majority of Scoundrels, Don Berry, probably the best 'popular' history written about the fur trade in the west of North America. The author has a very engaging narrative voice and an excellent command of the details. Berry just recounted the story of Hugh Glass, subject of The Revenant movie, but when you embed that story in the context of the whole early fur trade milieu, it just seems like part and parcel of the craziness.

D Eggers, THE CIRCLE

recently finished joe wambaugh's echoes in the darkness abt the philly main line murders. Started off p compelling but something abt the writing style and the characters really started to grate and I was happy to be done w it tbh

also joyce carol oates black girl, white girl. setup + tone reminded me a lot of Curtis sittenfeld's prep which I wonder if shes read this. anyway, its good; felt it was nearly young-adult (ish) and would be good for like a jr in hs to read prob, not too long, not super foreign to relate to, etc

Gillian Slovo: Ten Days -- novel about mass riots in the UK, heavily based on the 2011 outbreaks, based on lots of interviews with participants on both rioter and police sides. Interesting, but fairly pedestrian prose.

I spent the last week not reading Hume and instead reading David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. It’s a 1966 history of moral thinking about slavery, mainly concentrating on New World slavery up to the late 18th century. I learned a lot. I will definitely be reading the two sequel volumes on the "Age of Revolution" and the "Age of Emancipation" (the last one just came out in 2014).

charles stross, glasshouse -- solid sci-fi with some gender issues
geraldine brooks, year of wonders -- well-written and i am morbidly fascinated with the plague, but the protagonist was too saintly and the conclusion was quite a stretch
timothy snyder, bloodlands -- humanity deserves extinction

Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks.

http://i.imgur.com/QbBu6va.jpg

^Either that is carefully staged, or the owner of that bookshelf should be beaten without mercy.

Shkreli?

oh god, apparently it is Shkreli. How is that even possible?

just finished
Ben Yandell - The Honors Class: Hilbert's Problems and Their Solvers

a biography of mathematicians who solved some of 23 problems listed in 1900. Repitition is a problem: the standard story is a European who went to Germany for higher education, became a professor, and had to flee to America in the late 30s. Sometimes they go insane (e.g. Goedel would only eat his wife's food and starved to death when she was in the hospital.) The long chapter on Kolmogorov was quite interesting and I want to look into his work -- it has a lot of crossover with the later chaos/complexity theory.

Was interested in that because it won that one award for math writing and l really liked any of the other books I came across that had won it.

The prize is named after an ilx0r, I believe.

Muriel Spark: Symposium -- just started this, anatomy of a dinner party from hell, typically fine Spark nastiness

Carter Scholz: Gypsy -- SF novella about a desperate attempt to achieve interstellar travel, running up against all the non-negotiable indifference of physics and entropy. Really, really good and moving. Beautifull done, really, and takes only 100p where most writers would pad it out to 600 and do it much much worse. Can't recommend this highly enough, tbh. Sholz seems to have been writing since the 1980s, but hasn't published much.

'anatomy of a dinner party from hell' sounds like my shit

Recently started The Horse's Mouth, and right off it delivered: "Sun in a mist. Like an orange in a fried-fish shop." I was dimly aware of the trilogy, but not that this is vol. 3. Should I read the first two first?

Don't think so.

Muriel Spark: Symposium -- just started this, anatomy of a dinner party from hell, typically fine Spark nastiness

Carter Scholz: Gypsy -- SF novella about a desperate attempt to achieve interstellar travel, running up against all the non-negotiable indifference of physics and entropy. Really, really good and moving. Beautifull done, really, and takes only 100p where most writers would pad it out to 600 and do it much much worse. Can't recommend this highly enough, tbh. Sholz seems to have been writing since the 1980s, but hasn't published much.

Nakh - How is Wine for Dummies?

Carter Scholz also wrote criticism for The Comics Journal for a while

just started lucia berlin's a manual for cleaning women, read about 5/6 of the stories from it last night. it's really good. deadpan, funny, enigmatic at times, and grim - a lot of it has a kind of catholic texan or mexican setting.

catholic texmex

that is a lot of stories to read in one sitting

the wine for dummies book is at least playfully amusing given that said dummy is filmed drinking a bottle of wine retailing at....$11,995.00

there was an article about rupert murdoch where the hack describes him having (i think) kant's critique of judgment on his bookshelf and noted how choosing that instead of the critique of pure reason for example showed the depth of his erudition

that is a lot of stories to read in one sitting

they are quite short. i went from "not enjoying this too much" to being unable to stop. v good stories.

Recently started The Horse's Mouth, and right off it delivered: "Sun in a mist. Like an orange in a fried-fish shop." I was dimly aware of the trilogy, but not that this is vol. 3. Should I read the first two first?

I read them backwards starting w/horse's mouth, over several years, many books in between, still enjoyed. always something gained from chronology I suppose, but not necessary here.

see i got 'a manual for cleaning women' thinking it was going to be a much weirder sort of experience and when i realised i'd parsed the title wrong i put it down

(not a joke)

how did you read the title originally? i guess it's short stories in a fairly classic way.

i felt strange leaving it on my desk when the cleaner came in - it was the only book on an empty desk. i hid it a few weeks ago but became lax over time. hope she didn't find it and feel like she's in a horror movie.

'a manual for cleaning the dirt off women'

essentially yes! i had literally never heard the term 'cleaning woman', only 'cleaning lady'. i guess it's some sort of weird class thing.

i think i kind of read it both ways, though the story with that title makes it clear.

i would say "the cleaner" - think that's common in the uk, strange that it's freed itself from gender norms.

yes, certainly 'the cleaner' before 'cleaning lady'. but, again, 'cleaning woman', never. i had thought, perhaps, that the latter was american, but i guess not.

i guess like "dinner lady" or whatever is p common too. lollipop lady - did they have those in the us?

what's weird is that "lady" is more posh than "woman", right? lords and ladies. is it a case of posh people's shame causing them to give the person who cleans their house a grander title?

i'm from luton, mate, i don't know how american children get to school. i think it involves SUVs -- i think re lady vs woman it's to do with a particular sector of the lower middle class assuming a kind of affected posh shame, though, i don't know what actual posh people call them. 'scouts'.

it's interesting how totally wrong 'dinner woman' and 'lollipop woman' sound if you try those out, they don't even sound like valid english phrases

anyway so yeah i should actually read this book is what you're saying?

yeah it's good. recommend it.

we had lunch ladies here. at school.

i made a mental note of that book - along with the "hawk lady" book that i mention above - when it showed up on the NYT top ten of the year.

will keep that one in mind.

i'm doing a writing course at the moment and the first night the teacher used stories by lydia davis, kafka, ben marcus, and an irish writer called joanna walsh.

was familiar with the first 3 and i have joanna walsh's non-fiction book about staying in hotels, which i love, partly because i love hotels. there's a good extract here - http://granta.com/hotel-haunting/

but i really liked the two stories of walsh's he gave us - both from this: http://galleybeggar.co.uk/store/3am-books/fractals - it's kind of like lydia davis, sparse, sometimes feels personal to the writer, confessional at times.