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

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.

Just been getting into that Nikolaus Wachsmann book; KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, a from the outset study of the Nazi Concentration camps system that has been adding to my nightmares lately.

George Simenon - Maigret on the Riviera
Thomas Hardy - A Pair of Blue Eyes
Anne Enright - The Forgotten Waltz

Unusually for me, I have crept a short distance into three books: Aristotle's Politics, Henry James' Washington Square, & Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. Not sure which one I will return to this evening.

the last two you can read in an evening

Perhaps the last two you can read in an evening. I am not an especially fast reader. I tend to amble along.

Lately, I've been going slowly through Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, Carla Speed McNeil's Finder comics, Charles Burns's X'ed Out trilogy, the last couple of books of poetry by Fred Moten, Feel Trio and The Little Edges, and Charlotte Bronte's Villette, which has (as of about halfway through) one of the most fascinatingly self-divided and acerbic narrators I've come across.

Good discussion of Villette, Shirley, and (I think) The Professor here:

Charlotte Brontë's Shirley

Thanks, dow.

I guess I should read Octavia Butler. Where to start?

Good question; I'm impressed with Sower so far (among other things, SF or not, it's probably the most memorable literary response I've seen to the '92 LA riots and the political climate that made them possible), but it's the first novel by Butler I've read. The Xenogenesis/Lilith's Brood trilogy is supposed to have her most ambitious work, but I'll defer to the SF thread regulars for recommendations.

the first part of brideshead revisited (the friendship/romance with the son) was one of the best things i had ever read, but i got super bored when it moved on to the rest of the family and never finished it. i was probably too young for it at the time though

It's his worst novel by some distance.

Even including Helena?

Just started Max Berbohm essay collection, The Prince of Minor Writers (a NYRB book). Only read his fiction before, but these are mostly pretty great and funny so far.

I guess I should read Octavia Butler. Where to start?

"Kindred" is good.