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

love this line from ICB's Brothers And Sisters. sums her up pretty good:

"What is it? What are you all talking about?" said Sophia, coming into the room, her eyes at once apprehensive lest the talk might be about herself, and holding resentment ready in case it were not."

5.There’s an essay where [John Waters] writes about his favourite books, or, as he calls it, Five Books You Should Read to Live a Happy Life if Something is Basically the Matter With You. They are Denton Welch’s In Youth is Pleasure, Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, Jane Bowles’ Two Serious Ladies, and Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Darkness and Day.

In Youth is Pleasure is great, but p esoteric. Interesting to draw a line through those. ICB and DW are a good pairing.

i really don't know what kind of nonfiction i want to read. not necessarily a bio. maybe something about a certain industry. i really need to give it some thought.

feel bad sometimes that i love The Man Who Loved Children so much that no other Stead comes close for me. feel the same way kinda about Paula Fox. once you read Desperate Characters everything else gets measured against it. (i'm also waiting to read the Penelope Fitzgerald book that can compare to The Bookshop...haven't read them all yet.) man, there is a bleak Lit class for you. have everyone read those and throw in The Easter Parade by Richard Yates while you're at it. major bummer...

tomás gonzález, "in the beginning was the sea"

Are you only polling novellas from the 19th century, xyzzz___, or can it be more unwieldy than that?
― one way street, Tuesday, 2 June 2015 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It can be but I wonder if I put in Kafka's Metamorphosis that would just walk it wouldn't it?
I had a German only sideline that would be feature Kafka, Von Kleist, Mann's Death In Venice and Lenz. Maybe its just me but Kafka would also walk that so I switched to 19th century.
What else were you thinking of? Anything from earlier periods would be good too.
― xyzzzz__, Wednesday, June 3, 2015 5:57 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A few earlier works that come to mind are Behn's Oronooko, Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveler, Candide, Cervantes's Dialogue of the Dogs, Rameau's Nephew, Philosophy in the Boudoir, and Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, although maybe that assumes too flexible a definition of the novella. I was mostly thinking of twentieth century texts (e.g. The Beast in the Jungle, Heart of Darkness, Miss Lonelyhearts), Rulfo's Pedro Paramo, Hedayat's The Blind Owl, Platonov's Soul, Fitzgerald's May Day, Stein's Melanctha, Delany's The Star Pit, David Foster Wallace's The Sufferering Channel, Faulkner's Old Man, or Gass's The Pedersen Kid, among others), but I'd be fine with sticking to the nineteenth century and earlier.

Becoming Richard Pryor by Scott Saul

i seem to be reading 'negative dialectics', we'll see if that's true next week still

i found it surprisingly easy to get through (if not always easy to understand)--i may have been in a weird mental space.

yeah i've read lots of it, just seeming like the time for a serious read now. it seems to be the least unreadable of all his later work. i think the main source of difficulty is the allusiveness and the constant irony. but the conceptual space is smaller and the work is less substantive (like he admits at the outset), so familiarity w/ the philosophical tradition alleviates a lot of that difficulty. in contrast to 'aesthetic theory', which has just got way too much shit goin on for the prose to be the same kind of breeze.

I finished How We Decide. It had some interesting and suggestive tidbits to share, but as with many recent books on neuroscience, it far oversold the idea that a pile of suggestive tidbits could be coherently applied to ordinary and practical use, as a guide to behavior.

Its greatest value was to emphasize first that human brains are far more active and complex below the level of consciousness than we are ever consciously aware of, and secondly that emotions are as much a form of thought as our interior monologue and are generally accomplishing very useful work.

I am reading Shyness and Dignity by Dag Solstad. I returned C by Tom McCarthy. I got through the part that was sort of like Magic Mountain but not through the Great War. It was too much of a slog. I couldn't finish.

reading going clear by lawrence wright, which for the record is much better/more nuanced than the documentary although the doc is def good

Philip Roth - "I Married A Communist"
Gilles Deleuze - "The Time-Image"

i really don't know what kind of nonfiction i want to read. not necessarily a bio. maybe something about a certain industry. i really need to give it some thought.

Don't know if this appeals, but I just read Margaret Lazarus Dean's 'Leaving Orbit: The Last Days of AMerican Spaceflight', a wonderful look at the effective end of the US manned space program.

Weirdly, the last 3 books I read all featured NASA's stunning Vehicle Assembly Building (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_Assembly_Building)

The other two books were Ian Sales 'All that Outer Space Allows', an alternate=history SF novel about feminist SF writing and the Apollo program, and The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering by Jeffrey Rotter, a decaying US satire with some lovely writing but which didn't quite cohere fully

Don't know if this appeals, but I just read Margaret Lazarus Dean's 'Leaving Orbit: The Last Days of AMerican Spaceflight', a wonderful look at the effective end of the US manned space program.
This sounds great, thanks!

The other two books were Ian Sales 'All that Outer Space Allows'
Wait, is this the final Apollo Quartet book? Did it just come out?

Oh I see, April 27. I slept on it for a month. Now he's starting a new Space Opera thingie. We'll see.

Toying with idea of starting standalone thread for Station Eleven but wonder how far it will get, what with the cold equations of ILB.

just read it, so

Finished Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow", a bit dry in style but thought-provoking. Now reading John K. Galbraith's "The Affluent Society" - if nothing else, he's a much more stylish writer.

Galbraith was easily the best stylist economics ever produced. Not too shabby as a thinker, either.

one way street - I love lost of those 20th century recommends but it'll probbaly be spreading it too thin (anything more than 5-10 will do that due to the small size of ILB, and even then depends on whether it interests anybody.)

A few earlier works that come to mind are Behn's Oronooko, Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveler, Candide, Cervantes's Dialogue of the Dogs, Rameau's Nephew, Philosophy in the Boudoir, and Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, although maybe that assumes too flexible a definition of the novella.

gotta say I totally forgot Rasselas and Candide, as I don't like either of them. Haven't read any of the others although no doubt I'd add De Sade (whom I've been reading recently).

More great recommends I'll add everything here whenever I get round to doing it.

Okay, went ahead and started Station Eleven, By Emily St. John Mandel, a Standalone ILB Thread. Not much to it yet.

i will always read odd stories published in the 60's by women i have never heard of. as a rule. zero information on her on the web. though its nice to know all these years later that you can still buy first - and only - editions of this book from the eakins press website.

https://scontent-atl1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xta1/v/t1.0-9/11133745_10153847899852137_124843256554506580_n.jpg?oh=e3b1b8e1cc12c778cbde298733b89f1a&oe=5605E892

so I've now finished the Ishiguro, but before I move on to Satantango I'm going on a Cesar Aira mini-binge.

An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter made for a pleasant single-sitting read at a cafe over the weekend (special thanks to my telepathic mother, who phoned me two minutes after I had closed the book), & I think I'll try to repeat the experience next weekend with a reread of The Literary Conference (emboldened by the fact that lightning literally strikes the same place twice in one of these novels)

meanwhile, I'm savoring every new plot development in his comparatively sprawling (140 pp!) noir novel Shantytown

Georges Simenon - Dirty Snow
Michaelangelo Matos - The Underground is Massive
Barney Frank - Frank
John Ashbery - Your Name Here

shouldn't that be

John Ashbery - Alfred, Lord Sotosyn

then

Tom Spanbauer, I Loved You More

shouldn't that be

John Ashbery - Alfred, Lord Sotosyn

then

― j., Thursday, June 4, 2015 12:40 PM

DON: Well, yeah.

Sei Shōnagon is so good. I love all of the list entries.

126. Things That Should Be Large

Priests. Fruit. Houses. Provision bags. Inksticks for inkstones.

Men's eyes: when they are too narrow, they look feminine. On the other hand, if they were as large as metal bowls, I should find them rather frightening.

Round braziers. Winter cherries. Pine trees. The petals of yellow roses.

Horses as well as oxen should be large.

127. Things That Should Be Short

A piece of thread when one wants to sew something in a hurry.

A lamp stand.

The hair of a woman of the lower classes should be neat and short.

The speech of a young girl.

So, speaking of novels in dialogue, like Burnett and Green, the library shop suddenly has a big shiny hard copy of A Frolic of His Own, but seems like some ILBers found it disappointing, compared to Gaddis' previous. The Times reviewer, despite caveats, has just the opposite take. Almost all of its many blurbs either reference his earlier works or just generally praise his style etc. On the other hand, it did win the 1994 National Book Award.
I would just buy the damn thing, since it's very cheap, but running out of room, so have to picky. What do yall think of it?

I haven't read any other Gaddis fiction.

It's definitely worth reading, but I wouldn't start with it--the pacing seems slacker and the satire more monotonous than was the case with his earlier work. If you're put off by the length and difficulty of the earlier novels, try Carpenter's Gothic.

how's matos' book

Seconding A Frolic of His Own as definitely worth reading.

how's matos' book

really really really good imo

So Shantytown was amazingly fun; I give it my highest recommendation, although of course with the caveat (for those new to Aira's work) that there is nothing like a conventionally satisfying ending.

Satantango took a little while to get its hooks in me, with its relentlessly dense single-paragraph chapters (I thought my Thomas Bernhard experience might help but their common ground is basically zero); three chapters in, I've started to pick up on the rhythms of the prose & I'm finding my way a little easier. Probably good that I recently stopped smoking weed, as there's a lot to keep track of.

I am now reading a translation of Callirhoe, one of the first novels still extant, written in Greek, probably in the first century AD, but possibly earlier. It is a potboiler about the most beautiful woman in the world and her many tribulations.

One thing that makes it interesting is that it is written for an audience who took for granted an entire world that has since disappeared. Another is that, although it has an operatic plot and uses crude narrative devices no modern novelist would consider, it has enough psychological nuance and sophistication to strike many notes of enduring truth. Which definitely makes it literature, despite the melodrama. I'm enjoying it.

i'm reading The Game-Players Of Titan. which is also kinda melodramatic in a Greek way.

hey who's the other person reading satantango/how are you liking it

& is it just me or has the film become really hard to find

I finally started Us Conductors, by ILXor and award-winning novelist sean gramophone :) I got it for Christmas and last night I read the first two chapters. It is by turns gripping and really lovely, and such a fantastic unusual story that I can't believe it's never been fictionalised before.

Region 2 DVD of Satantango still cheap and available:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/S%C3%A1t%C3%A1ntang%C3%B3-DVD-Peter-Berling/dp/B000HRLWQM/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1434113653&sr=1-1&keywords=satantango+dvd

just finished karate chop, by dorthe nors. really enjoyed it.

just started white noise by don delillo - i already like this a lot more than other delillo i've read - a co-worker recommended to me - very funny so far.

I've been rereading Hamsun's Hunger. I read it for the first time in 1972. It is difficult to believe this was published in 1890. It was unlike any book ever published up to then and still seems like a singular achievement, even if you put it up against any book written since then. The same material in the hands of anyone else writing at the time (or in any other era, tbf) would have turned toward pathos in the first two pages and stayed there relentlessly, but Hamsun manages to avoid it entirely. It's like watching a magician at work. Great book!

have you read any other Hamsun? I never went beyond Hunger (which is a fascinating book) due to leeriness of fascist tendencies

I've read four or five other Hamsun novels. None of them are as groundbreaking as Hunger was, or even resemble it much. His other novels tell much more conventional stories. I learned a lot about life in Norwegian coastal villages at the turn of the twentieth century from them and enjoyed many of his characters, but Hunger stands alone as his great work of creative genius.

His fascism isn't evident in his work up to 1930 and I've never read his work beyond that period. He was very much a mythologizer and a Scando-romantic, so that aspect of fascism is probably what captured him, not the violent anti-Semitism.

I started counting up the Hamsun I've read. Came to eight. Mostly read them before 1976, but I've reread a few since then.

Hunger
Pan
Mysteries
Victoria
Growth of the Soil
Wayfarers
Wanderers
The Women at the Pump

JUst went out and bought a stack of things from charity shops again while looking for copies of Game of Thrones which I'd had to take back to the library largely unread.
THese include John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dunces which I read a few decades back but don't think I have acopy of apart from this one.
Also Philip K Dick's Lies Inc which I'm not familiar with but may be the last thing he was writing when he died.
Also got the book Wolf Of Wall St, wondering what's in the book that's different to the film.
You're Entitled tO an Opinion a biography of Tony Wilson
THe Way of tHe Rat a book on office politics.

Plus 2 .library books
Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything on climate change
& Scam! Inside America's Con Artist clans
so loads of more new stuff to read. I'd already done a search for the Game of thrones around charity shops on Tuesday and picked up a few then too.

Finished the book Blue blood by eddie conlon which was very interesting.