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

Successor thread to Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall 2015 ist. What Are You Reading Now?

Lillian Faderman - The Gay Revolution
Muriel Spark - Aiding and Abetting

anne hébert - kamouraska
jill leovy - ghettoside

i am reading LUCRETIUS

it is AMAZING

i think i should start doing drugs just in its cosmic psychedelic mindblown honor

Which translation? Or are you among the few who can read the original latin?

ronald melville for oxford, which dates to the late 90s. it seems to be quite sound. i've never read it before but i've studied epicureanism and it's clear he's trying to be accurate enough to get the arguments right. sublime verse too.

one must admire any philosopher who introduces the concept of atoms into the wider world, in verse!

and w/ reflexive aplomb

And often it is a matter of great importance
How these same atoms combine, in what positions
They are held, what motions they give and take.
For these same atoms form sky, sea, land, rivers, sun,
The same compose crops, trees, and animals,
And have different motions, different combinations.
Why, in my verses everywhere you see
Are many letters common to many words,
But yet you must admit that words and lines
Differ in meaning and the sounds they make.
Such power have letters through mere change of order;
But atoms can bring more factors into play
To create all things in their variety.

Started Moby-Dick - Sure am all abt the canon this xmas season!

this year's christmas dickens is Pickwick Papers. which i've not really got that far into (for external reasons) and it doesn't feel much like the dickens that i've liked (i have 3 left after this, Nickelby, Chuzzlewit, Twist. and Drood.)

been thinking about reading edwin drood as my first ever dickens and then working my way backwards, i dunno.

halfway through gurdjieff's meetings with remarkable men. enjoying the tall tales but feel that i'm maybe not picking up on some embedded esoteric subtext contained within (or if it's even actually there or not). planning on sourcing a copy of the first part of all & everything (beelzebub's tales to his grandson) for reading next year, in any case.

i started with Our Mutual Friend and read the second half first, entirely by accident.

am only reading PP during this trip home because a local pub* gets a one line mention in it, figured it was fitting.

* former royal coaching inn, now a Wetherspoons.**

** https://www.jdwetherspoon.com/pubs/all-pubs/england/gloucestershire/the-royal-hop-pole-tewkesbury

I read that same Lucretius translation a little while ago. It is amazing.

This strange cataclysmic ending scene:

And all the holy temples of the gods
Death filled with lifeless bodies, and everywhere
The shrines of the celestials, which the priests
Had filled with guests, stood loaded high with corpses.
For reverence now and worship of the gods
Counted for little, present grief was all.
No longer too the ancient customs stood
Of burial, which the city was wont to use.
Confusion and fear were everywhere, and in sorrow
Each buried his own as circumstance allowed.
And sudden need and poverty inspired them
To many actions horrible and shameful.
They placed their own kin on the funeral pyres
Of others, and with frenzied cries set light to them,
And often in the fighting that ensued
They shed much blood rather than leave the bodies.

dope as hell

Save it for the Lucretius spoilers thread.

Lol

Started Viv Albertine clothes Music Boys after buying it yesterday.
& before that From A to Biba which I'd had sent to my mum's place.
& before that Bukowski's Ham on Rye which was a charity shop find.
Now just got Gathering of Promises about Texas psychedelia
and Always in Trouble the Esp-Disk Oral History.
So need to work out which I'm reading first.
Also got a bio of 4AD cos it was 2 for £5 in Fopp and I'd seen the julian Cope novel One Three One which I'd meant to read so also have those 2.

been meaning to read the esp-disk oral history thing since it came out. wonder just how much stollman dissing made it into print. & wasn't aware of the texas psych book, looks interesting... still need to get around to eye mind: the saga of roky erickson and the 13th floor elevators.

nabokov - invitation to a beheading

for a book club, which is nice. thank god it's short though, falling so flat for me. i used to think i loved nabokov, having only read 'ada', but this is really musty imo. and apparently one of his most well-regarded.

It's one of my least favourite, fwiw--the other one that i didn't think that great was Look at the Harlequins

I am reading The Quiet American and rereading Chuang Tzu.

invitation to a beheading is one of my favorite books ever and one that made me cry irl
and i'm reading lolita. i read it when i was 17 or so but totally forgot everything about it except the obvious.

Still reading Kevin Kwan's "Crazy Rich Asians" and dipping into the "The Poems of Nazim Hikmet".

reading: Her Infinite Variety by Louis Auchincloss. from 2000. aka Y2K. i would like to own a complete leather-bound Auchincloss collection. for my law library.

he basically wrote the same book and got sloppier but what a book!

been meaning to read the esp-disk oral history thing since it came out. wonder just how much stollman dissing made it into print. & wasn't aware of the texas psych book, looks interesting... still need to get around to eye mind: the saga of roky erickson and the 13th floor elevators.

― no lime tangier, Saturday, December 26, 2015 12:23 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Not really got very far in either new book so far.
But Eye Mind was a good read and one I should reread not having read it more than once.
the Gathering oF Promises which is by Ben Graham seems to mainly focus on the IA related bands so I hope it does get further volumes on lesser known garage bands from the region and the up to present day thing that was initially supposed to be part of it added.

ONly read as far as the Stollman biography at the beginnning of the ESp bok so only knw about his parents and then his college time so far but also looks promising.

What genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?

I love thrillers. And I hate self-conscious literary fiction. As soon as reviewers say, “He/she makes beautiful sentences,” alarm bells ring. I like fiction that’s interested in the world, not in other fiction.

What do you plan to read next?

The new Lee Child.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/books/review/david-hare-by-the-book.html?ref=books&_r=0

ditto. snagged the new Child from dad yesterday.

did anyone else read City on Fire? i'm nearly finished and somehow i'm still unsure what i think of it.

Kicking off the year with Plato's Republic, which I have not read since summer 2006. I would like to learn it a lot better.

tr.?

G.M.A. Grube revised by C.D.C Reeve. Last time it was Allan Bloom. I don't know which is best.

i used the grube in school and for some reason have the belief that i should read it properly in that version rather than the reeve revision which i've read more than once for teaching purposes since then anyway. maybe it's just the cover. but i've been feeling like i need to bust out of my hackett ghetto for plato. i've been eyeing the update that loeb recently published (to keep the greek in eyeball range if not understand it), but i haven't been able to justify spending the $25 per volume.

the Bloom commentary is fascinating even though he's obv on the side of wrong

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes

(plot has p much NOTHING to do w/ great Nick Ray/Bogart film, but this is clammy and excellent)

Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Last year was a pretty slow reading year for me, so starting 2016 with something this lovely can hopefully provide decent encouragement.

I read Aiding and Abetting last week. She had the, uh, spark through the end of her life.

Have you read bio and autobiography, Alfred?

i read the autobio. which is a first volume never succeeded by another. it was ... i guess it was disappointing in how doggedly unrevealing it was, is what i would say.

which is aiding and abetting? the lord lucan one?

i read 'reality and dreams' last year; i think it was the only novel of hers i read that year, which was unusual, for me; either i've read around five or none. an ex sent me a copy -- they were posting a lot of books to people they thought would like them rather than just give them to a thrift store or try and sell them, despite the much greater inconvenience and cost. something about this speaks to how i feel about late spark, somehow.

I haven't read the autobiography. Yeah, A&A is about the Lucan case. Her manipulation of word of mouth accounts and experimenting with chronology are impressive for such a short book.

I think I own Aiding and Abetting, so maybe that's another for this year! This is the first Spark I've read and I'm really enjoying how dialogue-heavy it is. It reminds me a lot of Waugh at his most acerbic. Word count for 'prime' so far is about 200.

Finished Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan. It's unabashedly genre fiction but enlivened by what feels like a genuine insider feel for the details of a subculture which doesn't often feature in books of the genre: wealthy Singaporean Chinese society. It seems like there are some pacing issues: the first 400 pages could have moved a bit faster, and then everything happens in a rush at the end. Also it's obviously setting things up for a sequel so lots of threads are left hanging. Not sure I'll ever read the sequel but I enjoyed it.

Now I'm reading The Cold Song by Linn Ullmann, occasionally interleaved with Poems of Nazim Hikmet (tr. Blasing and Konuk).

I read most of Hugh Kenner's critical study, Ulysses, but decided that unless I was going to reread Joyce, my interest in the last 50pp was growing unsteady.

So, now I am reading Nathaniel's Nutmeg, Giles Milton, a narrative history of Europe's trade with the spice islands during the age of discovery, centering around various English voyages and the early East India Company. It sets a tone considerably breezier than a scholarly history would be, while remaining sober enough to avoid excessive burbling and the stylistic atrocities that show up in so much popularized narrative history.

Just finished Antal Szerb's Journey By Moonlight, it's an absolute delight. Probably going to recommend this to everyone I know.

Need to get further in Juan Filloy's Caterva but got distracted by King Leopold's Ghost.

Yes, gave my copy of the Szerb away - need to get another.

Just finished Iain Sinclair, LONDON OVERGROUND.

Despite being lazy ('Again I remembered interviewing Allen Ginsberg in 1967') and self-referential ('as I said in Downriver ...'), going on about the usual suspects ('Bill Griffiths is the true prophet of place', 'Angela Carter takes mythic ownership of Brixton') and paying far too little attention to the reality and extent of the Overground (which he doesn't realize goes to Crystal Palace) -- this book does have something. There were passages where I really felt I was reading great work, flashes of blazingly good, poignantly apt prose that only Sinclair's talent could produce.

Aimless, I think Kenner's book Ulysses is one of the very best critical books I have ever read.

It might be the single best book specifically on Ulysses.

I agree. I bought the Kenner on your recommendation, albeit a recommendation you made in an ILB thread many years ago. Kenner seems extremely sharp on Joyce, Pound, Eliot, et. al.

currently zipping through lawrence wright's "the looming tower," which is really great. beautifully written and enthralling. also just started rachel carson's "silent spring," which i picked up on a whim a few months back. surprised to find that the drawings were done by louis darling (with his wife lois), who illustrated beverly cleary's early books.

currently reading "the big short", which i got as a xmas gift years ago but never read. thought i would read it before seeing the film adaptation so i can "actually," everyone i talk to about it

I read plenty of stuff that is disturbing in different ways, it's mostly just a weird strong reaction I have when I'm not well. I'll probably keep going with it, or put it aside until I feel better.

(As context, 2666 might be my favorite novel of the century so far, and I like a lot of art that is in various ways painful or concerned with forms of abjection, but I think people should be able to make their own decisions about what artworks they continue to engage with. (For example, "In a Year with 13 Moons" is a brilliant film in many ways, and it's stuck with me more vividly than almost any other Fassbinder film, but for personal reasons, I don't know if I'd ever choose to watch it again.) I think Maggie Nelson's take on this in The Art of Cruelty is fairly nuanced.
Xp

I read plenty of stuff that is disturbing in different ways, it's mostly just a weird strong reaction I have when I'm not well. I'll probably keep going with it, or put it aside until I feel better.

Yeah, either choice is totally valid.

I mean, Clive Barker is maybe my favourite 'pop' author, but the violence and gore is kept at arms length by the fantasy. Then again, I've read books about operation condor, Pinochet etc., so I'm not sure the later part will bother me (though I should probably investigate why it feels different). I just want to go back to the part about the boring professors/critics...

I mean, I feel like gradually removing the layers of relative protection from historical violence the critics enjoy is part of Bolaño's strategy, but I definitely find "The Part about the Crimes" to be both crucial to the novel's project and extremely viscerally upsetting to read.

I can appreciate what he's doing, this repetitive style of description, the eroding of distinction between the killers and the police etc. I certainly don't think it's gratuitous or sadistic, I just find it hard.

Yeah, it is hard, and that's a understandable reaction.

FWIW I read large portions of 2666 on break at my night job, or in the morning when I got off and couldn't sleep... I'm not sure if this helped me to read 'The Part About the Crimes' (bc reading disinterestedly, 'to pass the time'), or helped me to misread it (bc cynically detached, like a train commuter with a newspaper) -- the strongest impression I retain of that section is of an otherworldly temporal rhythm that quickly settles over both book & reader, alongside a paucity (but not a total absence) of narrative development, giving the whole thing this weird sense of frenzied exhaustion. But then again, that could just be the insomnia talking ;)

I think there is narrative development in that section along various strands; it just doesn't lead toward clarity. My own reading method was one of horrified immersion, but you're right that the narrative rhythm of that section is distinctly unsettling.

2666 might be my favorite novel of the century so far

Seconded.

For me 'The Part About the Crimes' sets into motion a kind of enhanced dissociation. The brain stops appropriately processing the horror of each individual case after the first few, and all of that rhythmic, forensic facelessness just loses you in the claustrophobic, abyssal desert of futility. Frenzied exhaustion is exactly what I felt too. A kind of appalled ambivalence that sees its efforts fade like mirages in the heat. I think it's got a lot to do with cracking open the body and mind of the detective and putting us directly inside and that being central to unlocking more of the self, potential versions of which we are fielded later in the section. On a different level of engagement, one you can carry away from the trance of reading and into daylight reason and discourse, Bolaño is forcing a crucial wider recognition of these whitewashed atrocities.

there seemed to be another pair of eyes behind his eyes

I was trying to remember this ^ quote from Distant Star, which I'm lifting totally out of context, but it nevertheless encapsulates both the dream-like encasement of oneself, and the inducement of something like a psychopathic removal of affect when the fabric of reality is so threatened by the impossibility of the crimes. A long-winded way of saying I agree with what's been said... Naturally, if it's stirring up anything too negative, then there's plenty to recommend some of his less death-intensive novels.

tangenttangent, who's the translator of yer Don Quixote? I wanna read that too.

― dow, Wednesday, March 23, 2016 3:34 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh, I missed this - sorry. It's Ozell's Revision of the Translation of Peter Motteux, published in 1967, chosen because...it's what we had in the house. I couldn't find much about it during a brief search online, so I can't imagine it'll be the one you end up with, but it definitely seems to read smoothly compared with my experience of 'bad' translations.

Enjoying very much so far, if a bit daunted by my slow progress in comparison with its immediate and rapid acceleration. Also, it is laugh out loud funny.

Journey by Moonlight is wonderful, I've been recommending it to people constantly since reading it a few months back.

Got kind of bogged down in the middle of Acceptance, last book in the Southern Reach trilogy. Found a relatively cheap copy of Strange Doings by R. A. Lafferty last night and have been enjoying the hell out of it. The bookstore also had 900 Grandmothers but it would have cost $70.

I saw 900 Grandmothers is now an ebook for about $4, was thinking of grabbing it since Lafferty is one of those writers I keep hearing about and have never tried.

Really, where?

Think there are a few other contenders alongside 2666 for novel of the 21st century etc yadda yadda. Certainly DeWitt's Last Samurai. Saer's La Grande (2005) Hilbig's Sleep of the Righteous are two recent translations that were so good. Ferrante's The Days of Abandonment (2005) too.

Of the untranslated maybe Solstad's Telemark book.

Fuck a Knausgaard.

re: Part about the Crimes. Reading De Sade last year and there was something there in the accumulation of horrific detail. Their projects were very different (I'll just state that here just in case there was any doubt), but Bolano is so much flatter as a writer - and very comfortable with that. The horrors described in that section keep passing you by. Weirdly breezy yet horrific at the same time. But isn't that so much like life today?

Except there is that high level of immersion.

DeWitt is 2000 and Hilbig was 2002. Solstad is 2013.

Ferrante's The Days of Abandonment (2005) too.

my man B-)

enjoyed this Easter afternoon reading Gotthelf's The Black Spider. There is much to be said for novels that can be read in a couple of hours. I'm wondering now what Gotthelf meant by all of the people who came from foreign lands, though.

I just finished Richard Ford's The Sportswriter. I thought I hated it at first, but circumstances have dictated that I read it over the space of six weeks and at that speed - the speed of life or something - it's made absolute sense. I've found the pace comforting, the (relatively) low-key nature of the events comforting, and there's something to be said for Ford's refusal of the numinous, and his relative refusal of manifest destiny. I think it's still probably in Rabbit's shadow, but I need to chew it over a bit more.

james, http://www.amazon.com/Nine-Hundred-Grandmothers-R-Lafferty-ebook/dp/B01A5TIIMM/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1459117056&sr=1-1&keywords=Lafferty+grandmothers

Though the price may be more/less depending on what country you're in

Ah, doesn't seem to work in US.

Frederick Philip Grove, Over Prairie Trails
Jane Urquhart, Sanctuary Line

Thanks for getting back to me about the translation, tangenttangent. Re the 2666 (and other) experience, the Bolano thread is worth checking. It changes after "The Part About The Crimes": some of the characters from previous sections reappear, engaged in their usual pursuits, obsessions, etc,, but nothing is ever the same, because the sense of something monstrous and clinical and ultra(?)-obsessive is under the surface/between the walls, exerting pressure but never surfacing, in subsequent sections; and some of the characters rail against, it but there's no release. Reminds me of a version of "All Along The Watchtower" I saw Dylan and the boys doing one time, back in the 90s. In the book and the performance, there were fluctuations on the exertion of pressure, but that just increased the tension.
I took it that this is Bolano's version of The Way We Live Now, or anyway the way we live now, and the feeling of pressure he had while writing, and knowing (at some point during this project) that he was mortally ill.

And I think it's the afterword where someone states that Bolano wanted the sections to be published separately, hoping to maximize his children's inherited royalties.

I've been reading Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History by John Patrick Diggins.

I've started in on The Big Short. Lewis sure knows how to construct a narrative that propels your interest. The arrogance, ignorance and general sleaze of most Wall Street traders is no surprise and therefore after you're done getting angry at them they are essentially uninteresting, so Lewis focuses on a few traders who are atypical, surprising and capable of holding your interest.

polished off "my lunches with orson" in two days, now onto "class" by paul fussell

I've been reading Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History by John Patrick Diggins.

― o. nate, Monday, March 28, 2016 9:31 PM

This is the one by the purported liberal, right?

Sonia Shah: Pandemic -- fascinating history of cholera, using it as a springboard to look at pandemics and their effects on human biology/history/society, etc

Granddaddy of all pandemic books was Plagues and Peoples, Wm. McNeill. It launched a thousand ships, so to speak.

curious to hear what you think of Big Short, Aimes. i read it this January and really liked it.

I found it wasn't actually as good at explaining the finance stuff as some reviews claim. I think Lewis assumes the reader is bored by that stuff (what a CDS actually is) so he over-compensates with focus on the foibles and quirks of the characters' personalities. also i remain a bit unclear about each individual's contributions, a lot o people i know who read the book or saw the movie came out of it thinking the Cornwall Capital guys were somehow responsible for the crash, which is really not the case. i don't think Lewis ever explicitly says that, but i can see how it's unclear enough that someone could walk away thinking that

I'm about halfway through The Big Short. afaics, Lewis only explains as much of the financial stuff as he thinks is necessary for his readers to feel they have a bare grasp of what is going on. I am guessing there are far better 'explainer' books out there that lay it out in much greater depth and detail. All Lewis really wants you to walk away with is the unshakable belief that the global financial system is run entirely by thieves and charlatans. He succeeds in this.

This is the one by the purported liberal, right?

Diggins is hard to pigeonhole. He described himself as "to the right of the Left and to the left of the Right".

A couple of interesting pieces about him:
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/man-in-the-middle-john-patrick-diggins
https://newrepublic.com/article/71889/john-patrick-diggins-1935-2009

The book is interesting because it recasts Reagan as an Emersonian romantic and as a liberal in certain key aspects. It tries to understand the roots of his political philosophy and how he governed. Overall it's a fairly sympathetic look, but also clear-eyed about his shortcomings.

All Lewis really wants you to walk away with is the unshakable belief that the global financial system is run entirely by thieves and charlatans. He succeeds in this.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Tuesday, 29 March 2016 17:22 (1 hour ago) Permalink

Huh, this wasn't really my impression. I got a sense more of genuine ignorance at complexity of the housing loan contracts, plus the fucked up incentives of the loan rating agencies (as well as the incentive to remain ignorant of what was in the loans in the first place), than individual malice. Which I liked because thinking of Finance as just a bunch of villains makes it hard to think about how to reform it. Shame that he left he whole agency problem of investment/shadow banking to like the last page of the afterword.

List with brief comments, some intriguing, others not(but dammit why can't I remember to get The Art of Memory?):

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/t-magazine/entertainment/my-10-favorite-books-simon-critchley.html?WT.mc_id=D-NYT-MKTG-MOD-30555-03-29-HD&WT.mc_ev=click&WT.mc_c=

Michael Bloch - Closet Queens
Will Cuppy - The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody

Jean Rhys - After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. There is no heartbreak or disappointment - Rhys' amin characters get just what they expect out of people which is exactly zilch. Nada. Certainly worse. And its a world you are happy to swim in because the writing is so good. In some ways Wide Sargasso Sea might be her only bad book - although I should revisit - it made not that much of an impression. Working back from Good Morning, Midnight is really working, even if I had to start it over again I'd do so from the beginning. Looking forward to two more books of short stories and Quartet later this year.

Tanizaki - In Praise of Shadows. At first its an innocent looking short essay on Japanese aesthetics. There is a shadow of nationalism running through it, a longing for what was and can never be again.

Rhys's Tigers are Better-looking is extraordinary, I think, and Sleep it Off, Lady is slighter but still haunting at times in the way of increasingly skeletal late writing.

Excellent.

When you've exhausted Rhys's own books, it's quite interesting to read her one (that I know of) translation, Francis Carco's 'Perversity': it's nowhere near as good as her own stuff, but you can see why it appealed to her.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/95/1f/30/951f30e03eb93fa82ec8e35cf93428dc.jpg

Rhys's collected letters, edited by Diana Athill, are worth looking at, but maybe not read in full, since they basically boil down to "O poor me, I canot cope, I need money, i can't do anything for myself, o alack alas" and that wears you out after a couple of hundred pages. Athill writes movingly and entertainingly about Rhys in 'Stet'--she was her editor and frequent helper for quite some time.

Well I am looking at reading a vol of Van Gogh's letters later in the year so that might be ok.

Ha! Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo? They're wonderful.

Yeah.

Pat Barker - Life Class
Gary Donaldson - Truman Defeats Dewey
Byron - Selected Letters

... but which will take it upon themselves to start the WAYR thread of the new season?

Here.

think there's a katherine mansfield story based on her stay in war-torn paris and her relationship with carco... i need to reread her stories, it's been a long time.

It's 'An Indiscreet Journey': https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/mansfield/katherine/something/chapter14.html -- Didn't know that it was based on her and Carco!

Really enjoyed Mieville's new novella while I sat in the rare sun at the pub today. Don't know hat folks opinions are of him, but it was some of his best writing.

Spring and All 2k16 / what are you reading now?