As 2012 learns to toddle: what are you reading?

This new John Lanchester really isn't very good. It's fairly consistently off.

Of the contents of a newsagent:

the fridge full of soft drinks and the adjacent fridge of alcohol, and the bottles of Ribena and orange squash, and the credit card machine and the Transport for London card-charging device and the Lottery terminal

Yeah I'll just top up my Transport for London card on the Transport for London card-charging device? And it's an accumulation of minor things like, which constantly undermine my faith in his sense of the material furniture of his book. He handles this sort of thing quite well in his essays, but it's a bit of a bodge here.

It's also really really boring. Following characters with rather wobbly voices around the street they live on, all delivered in a lumpen and laborious prose. The info he wants to impart is getting through, but the tone, and the matter, is just... well, as I say, it's boring.

...of minor things like that

Finished West's The Return of the Soldier in record time. The definition of a good minor novel.

n/a, have you seen the massive online annotations McSweeney's have put up--millions of fascinating photos following the book's plot: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/books/amomentinthesun/bonus

― Not only dermatologists hate her (James Morrison), Tuesday, February 28, 2012 6:01 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

woah, i had not seen this! it's insane - thanks

Another new character! Another one! Laboriously hoving into view with the onset of another tediously quotidian chapter. Good Lord.

If pressed, on the basis of appearances, Petunia (ffs) would have put his age at about seventeen, though she supposed he must be thirty or so.

No. "17" is the frivolous response, "thirty or so" the that would be ellicited by pressing.

can someone explain 'a moment in the sun' to me

And wd it hurt to put the ł in for Polish words like kiełbasa & Michał? Maybe, don't know. Looks slightly odd without it. Problem verging on the lunatic edge of pickiness I realise, but something about this book makes me want to pick pick pick away. post.

It is the same urge that I get when I see a sweater covered with pills and bits of lint.

That's it! And when you spot one bit, well that's it. Every single speck needs attending to.

Don't know what that 'post' is doing there, oh right, xpost. Thought I'd expressed what was only supposed to be a mental command.

can someone explain 'a moment in the sun' to me

As in what it's about? In a nutshell, it's about the era when the US first decided to mess around on the international stage (war with Spain in Cuba, the Phillipines) at the same time as massive internal changes were going on (aftermath of abolition of slavery, gold rushes, technological developments) told through a whole bunch of different characters over 1000 pages

Reading some great Angela Carter short stories. I particularly like the stories of 4-year-old Lizzie Borden and the rewriting of Jacobean playwright John Ford's "'Tis Pity She's a Whore" as a western by film director John Ford

tbh fizzles I noticed you were reading it & wasn't quite sure why – don't think of solid middle-aged male british contemporary novelists (lanchester • hollinghurst • hensher) as up your alley. Was it Whoops! that turned your head? I really liked it, but was still sus of him as fiction writer, I guess.

The 'Transport for London card' thing is very strange. He *can't* have written that in the first place, so maybe an editor or early reader suggested that people outside London won't know what an Oyster Card is? But then 'travel card' if you have to give in on that. Want to know now, might try to get his email, pester him about it.

I think I agree on dark l… we're close to naturalising kielbasa maybe, but yeah with names, make the effort.

Reading the Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin. Really liked the first part (Bro), finding the second book (Ice) to be a lot less engaging. Got Babylon by Victor Pelevin lined up for afterwards.

Thomas M. Disch - The Genocides. Its my first by him...heavy going, as all bks are at the min.

yeah, I felt the desire to go into an area I wouldn't normally. + I saw a good review (sucker).

Also I read The Debt to Pleasure ages ago and thought it was good. (taste's prob changed tho & can't remember any details now - unreliable narrator? food?).

I was hoping at least it would be well written, but it's really not. It's just about laboriously competent. Just.

He does use Oyster later. I think he's just p bad at doing that sort of thing.

He's introduced another new character! Another! A sort of Banksy figure! This is dire. Sorokin was next on my list and I wish I'd skipped straight to it, although a perverse part of me is now enjoying how much this book is annoying me.

we're close to naturalising kielbasa maybe

i love this. for some reason.

I read Brian Glanville Goalkeepers Are Different, which I had as a nipper. It was very enjoyable, once I got used to it - the narrator's voice is very convincing, like how an ordinary blole from the period might have spoken, all 'you know' and 'if you see what I mean's. It's very unlike other styles that I've read of late, which are much tighter, and slightly unfairly makes the book drag 'til you get into it. I had similar with Orwell's Coming Up For Air a couple of years ago, which I had to set aside as a result.

It's a kids' book btw, the story of a young goalkeeper breaking into the first team at Borough and 'what it is really like to be a professional footballer'. It was published in 1971, so plenty of scope for irony there - young Ronnie earns as much in a couple of months as his postman dad takes home in a year, in fact so much so that after a run in the first team he can afford to move out of the family home and into shared digs with another first-teamer and a nice landlady. It's perfectly readable young adult material, as much a short novel as a kids' book really.

Anyway, into Ismaelinho's box it goes, for another layer of irony in a few years when he gets to read an actual, physical book.

Now Letting Go by Philip Roth. This was his debut novel supposedly, although written after Goodbye, Columbus. It's a lot longer though. There's no particular difference between this and any other Roth, except that he gets a lot dirtier. Basically he started out great and stayed great. I've got about half his novels to go, before I have to somehow start tracking down unpublished things. How does one even do that?

'ordinary bloke'. I don't know what an 'ordinary blole' is.

He's introduced another new character! Another! A sort of Banksy figure! This is dire. Sorokin was next on my list and I wish I'd skipped straight to it, although a perverse part of me is now enjoying how much this book is annoying me.

i certainly am, if that helps

'debt to pleasure' = would maybe have like to have been nabokov when it grew up, narrator has poisoned some dudes, envies his brother's career as chef, is self-described gourmand, presents memoir of dudes he has poisoned as a series of menus. it's aight i guess. i can now never read his new one (which btw how have you managed not to mention the title, because when i saw this in waterstones yesterday i had to suppress a groan) because i will spend the whole time waiting to get to the 'transport for london card-charging device'

i'm in a quandary over whether to get the paperback of 'a moment in the sun' or not.

IK i read 'goodbye, columbus' at the weekend and 'the plot against america' on monday and i would certainly disagree with the assertion that roth "started great and stayed great"

with both bits?

I'm enjoying Balkan Ghosts enough to wonder whether I should attempt Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon...

'plot against america' is structurally really broken, has some passages of truly awful prose -- the kind of praise it got is just a reminder that a lot of people can't read

i really like the stories in the back half of '...columbus' which aren't about a jewish guy trying to have sex. although the last one ('eli, the fanatic') could have productively ended two pages before or fifty pages after it does end, which isn't a very good place for it to end

it's interesting to think of them in relation to, like, ultra-slick MFA writing. because they share a lot of characteristics but are nicely rough-edged -- you're left in no doubt that this roth dude is a genuinely talented guy, i found myself thinking 'if he carries on writing stories that aren't about jewish dudes trying to get laid he's going to be so awesome'

i find roth pretty fascinating and compelling, mainly because he's deeply self-aware at the same time as he's deeply solipsistic, if that makes any kind of sense. but i'm pretty sure i 'dislike' him.

I'm meaning to give ... Against ... another go. I did like it, but it is definitely the least of the intense run he had going immediately beforehand. I always had the sense that the acclaim was purely for allegorical reasons, like Obama's peace prize, as if there was a collective seizure that Bush may actually be some kind of protoNazi and here was a riskfree way to stand against it.

There are definitely fantastic, intimate sections in there (is that the one with descriptions of fathers & sons playing baseball on Sunday mornings, then scalding hot showers, a real adult pleasure? I loved that) but the epic part of the narrative was more than they could perhaps bear. I'd like to read again, now that stopping America becoming actually Nazi is maybe a little less ... pressing.

You know what has some awful prose is The Human Stain. . .

isn't Letting Go is attempt at a Jamesian novel? It's the only novel of his besides the Nixon satire I haven't read.

I've never read Henry James so I don't know, but he has been mentioned more than once so far (I'm a hundred pages in). But then this is true of half the stuff I ever read these days, so I didn't think anything of it.

Heh, the Nixon satire is now the only one I don't own - the missus filled in the gaps for me for Christmas, and I couldn't bear to make her spend money on it.

yeah i think the reading of 'plot' as relating to the bush administration is actually really quite flattering to it? in that it takes what is otherwise a historical nonsense and gives it a plausible reality

i think the washington section has some v good writing, although it doesn't require any of the alternate-history apparatus of the book to be in place for it to actually work

I didn't know that anyone actually read Plot as a commentary on the Bush administration - seems like a major stretch to me, even if you dislike Bush a lot. Since the only other Roth I've read is Portnoy, I was disappointed that Plot wasn't funnier, but I guess that wasn't the point. It was fun to read as alternate-history, in the same vein as Dick's Man in the High Castle.

It was definitely received as such in the UK - Homeland Security, Guantanamo, wearing the flag, and what we heard about talk radio all that raised those echoes over here, and Bush himself never got anything approaching a fair hearing in our media. It seems a bit silly now, so I'd like to reread as pure alternate history. Plus I rather like Lindbergh, I'd quite like to test that again.

Roth, to his credit, has never gone near the idea that it's a Bush administration allegory. Things like that only diminish the work, I feel, unless you really are allegorising totalitarianism.

Edward St. Aubyn - The Patrick Melrose Novels

cover is so hideous that I'm embarrassed to read on the subway

xp I'm trying to find contemporaneous reviews, and to be fair they're not as bad as I'd feared. It's plainly there in the background ("surely the novel is topical; isn’t that what the title says? Well, this is, perhaps, what people have taken the title to mean. Two current plots against America spring immediately to mind. There is the global plot of al-Qaida against the evils of capitalism, substantively and symbolically centred in the US – the war on terror is a war against the elusive authors of this plot. And there is, settling down now as a major fear of many Americans, the plot of the Bush administration to abolish many civil liberties and concentrate autocratic powers in the hands of the president ... But the plot in the novel is neither of these, although there are times when it looks like the second") but it's mostly taken at face value. Maybe it was other stuff I was reading.

Yeah, I can see how it would resonate with the climate of fear (both of terrorism and of the government overreach in response) at the time it came out. I remember reading reviews like that too, but I think it was more people reading into it.

I just received my NYROB edition of Belchamber.

Alfred, re: Black Lamb,

You should! It's a big book, but not difficult. If you care about the subject-matter then it goes pretty quickly, and the subject-matter is some of the most interesting there is: the legacy of World War I, the rise of fascism... Mostly though I like her finicky obsessiveness with people, clothing, art, architecture, religion, food, and everything else. It's all grist for reflection.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7181/6945160803_bac14fe983.jpg This was sitting on my dad's desk when he died. It's about structural engineering, but as it's Russian it has lots of poetry quotations and stuff in it. It's a pretty easy read, will get to it when I have time. Am slowly learning Russian.

thanks, Träumerei!

The latest edition boasts a Hitchens intro, I see.

'the letter killers club', 'seeing', an anthology of comic SF (er), 'gender trouble'

i am tempted to start a rolling theory thread but i feel like it will just be me blogging things i don't understand

I think Lacan is the main reason why I dropped out of university.

― Nathalie (stevie nixed), Thursday, 13 April 2006 12:46 (5 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

St. Aubyn really knows how to write cruelty -- painful stuff to read even though the prose is near perfect.

I'm about 3/4 through Parzival, so I haven't reached the climax of the story, but I thought I'd put in a good word for the author, Wolfram von Eschenbach. If the translation is true to the original (and Hatto seems quite a good translator) Wolfram is the best of the epic poets I've read from that era.

He drops in the obligatory descriptions of clothing and other luxurious appurtenances that his audience obviously craved (the Niebelungenlied natters on at interminable length about fabrics, jewelry, and jousting paraphernalia), but von Eschenbach hurries past these details as quickly as he decently can and gets right back to describing people and their motives.

He keeps the fabulist elements well in check, too. He keeps the portion of malevolent dwarves, dragons, giants, enchanted trees, or enchanted castles, or enchanted whatsiwhosis to a minimum, so that while the story includes a few such elements, it never elevates them to much importance. Instead, he seems to be more interested in social mores and the sorts of moral double-binds inflicted by the demands of chivalry. He defends the ladies often and well, but not as a dewy-eyed romantic idealist, but rather the contrary. I like him. He even stops from time to time to complain about the meagreness of his love life, in a humorous, mock-serious tone.

I give Parzival the high mark among its peers - at least among the half dozen or so I've read so far.

Malevolent dwarves > meagre love life.

But maybe that's just me thinking the grass is always greener.

I am moving into a new place, and thinking that one of the only books I will bring with me (at least at first) is my recently-acquired and more-or-less-untouched copy of Elias Canetti's Auto da Fe... which is about an obsessive book collector, right? hoping to gain some 'self-knowledge'...

Do you have a bookshelf (or its equivalent as measured in heaps of books) in your bathroom? If so, seek help.

Edward St. Aubyn - The Patrick Melrose Novels

cover is so hideous that I'm embarrassed to read on the subway

haha is it the glossy black and hot pink one? i bought that edition last weekend. i dont really like it honestly, and its less exacting and precisely written than i was expecting. there are a bunch of baggy sentences and cliches and the attempts to write from 5 yo patrick's pov are p limp. idk, there are some good zingers but its p ridiculous.

T.H.O.M.P. - what did u think of 'letter killers'???

I got over it and am reading it on the subway anyway. I do really like it, although I agree that his writing sometimes gets overly weighed down with simile -- curious to see if it gets a little tighter in the later novels. His prose passes my most important test, i.e. the writing basically *reads itself* to me.

lamp i read it in a terrible mood when i was reading because i didn't want to go to sleep so i can't really say, i sort of want to read it again -- it is definitely the only thing i have read that made me think both of stanislaus lem and jerome k. jerome if that helps? er

god, i suppose i finished 'gender trouble' today, that felt exhausting. and immediately i started reading gerard genette. lol grad school

also deborah eisenberg and alice monro, to stay sane

& bolano's 'amulet', which mainly just made me want to read his other stuff again

haha bolano and munro its like i mean ok

bought at the thrift store today: penguin classics 'road to wigan pier' a book about herbal remedies for cats called 'cats - naturally' 'the immoralist' by andré gide also in the grey penguin modern classics and a taschen book of illustrated vegetables