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

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.

Short story collection 'Bloodchild' is pretty representative of her themes and strengths.

xxp I read that NYRB article on him. That collection sounds good, is his fiction good?

So with Butler we get her take on how human/humanoid organisms can change and be changed, veering through the walls of identity, in a seemingly random way---for instance, a young black woman, married to a white man, ricochets back and forth between late 20th Century America (LA, I think) and the Antebellum South, where she encounters her white male ancestor and her black female ancestor, one the slaveowner, one the slave: that's Kindred The slaveowner is quite the erratic charmer at times, and things get even more complicated than they might otherwise. Clay's Ark has to do with a highly infectious disease brought back from outer space, and the mutant children that result.
But Clay's Ark is also part of the Patternmaster series, which is Science Gone Too Far, with Butler's development from implications of Frankenstein, also her variation on (and maybe response to) the critique of mystiques, incl the power fanasties leading to and frompurposeful evolution in Frank Herbert's Dune trilogies.
I don't remember the Xenogenesis trilogy very well, but this is a pretty good basic description of the Patternmaster books (but see the main Wiki on Butler for more details, incl. the order in which they should be read. also, I seem to recall thinking that she kept what she may have perceived as her tendencies to melodrama on a very short leash, wnich could add to the tension, but make her seem a bit self-doubtful, tentative at times)(then again, the Patternmaster is an aeons-old African vampire parapsychologist, intent on breeding a new race of telepaths.)
The Patternist series (also known as the Patternmaster series or Seed to Harvest) is a group of science fiction novels by Octavia E. Butler that detail a secret history continuing from the Ancient Egyptian period to the far future that involves telepathic mind control and an extraterrestrial plague. A profile of Butler in Black Women in America notes that the themes of the series include "racial and gender-based animosity, the ethical implications of biological engineering, the question of what it means to be human, ethical and unethical uses of power, and how the assumption of power changes people."[1]

Butler's first published novel, 1976's Patternmaster, was the first book in this series to appear. From 1977 until 1984, she published four more Patternist novels: Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980) and Clay's Ark (1984). Until Butler began publishing the Xenogenesis trilogy in 1987, all but one of her published books were Patternist novels (1979's Kindred was the exception)

Of Beerbohm's fiction I've read Zuleika Dobson, which was fun, and Seven Men and Two Others, which is excellent, esp. if you like piss-takes of literary types.

read "no good men among the living", which was astonishing. before that patrick cockburn's book on ISIS, which was good but sorely needing a good edit. now onto rory stewart's book about walking from herat to kabul

Thomas Hardy - A Pair of Blue Eyes

esp. if you like piss-takes of literary types

Oh yes. Ta.

hi everyone -

can anyone recommend some good fiction that is set in Guatemala?

thanks in advance,

gr8080

and yes i found this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Novels_set_in_Guatemala

looking for a pr0-tip

I have been wanting to read Senselessness by Castellanos Moya for a good long while now.

Finished Saer's La Grande last weekend. Probably the best writer to have ever emulated those naturalistic Proustian sentences (I doubt many have tried tbh) and there is a weird effect of having explicit sexual encounters written about in those Proustian paragraphs (where Proust used those blocks of writing to hide himself Saer's characters are naked physically and emotionally too). Equally though Bolano isn't such a lone-ish figure (La Grande is Saer's last bk from 2005), both talk about dictatorships and their meddling in literary circles (via shadowy 'failed' poets), there is no magical realism to disguise anything either. Although Saer doesn't make use of pulp-ish writing in the way Bolano might. At times I would like to read less about lives destroyed by those dictatorships but it is such a part of those writerly lives that as soon as I write this it becomes a rubbish thing to say.

All Dogs are Blue by Rodrigo de Souza Leão is short but inevitably intense and comical sets of scenes in an asylum (where Rodrigo was confined by his family). No issues like those in Wild Man Fischer (say). It is touching how literature is almost his only, best friend - Rimbaud especially. So I turned to reading him this week.

|||||||| u may also like 'an unexpected light' (unless you've had enough afghanistan)

I just returned from a brief camping trip, during which I finished reading Washington Square. It was very much like a Jane Austen novel condensed to novella length and pretty damned brilliant in its execution. Now I am reading Cannery Row.

I have been wanting to read Senselessness by Castellanos Moya for a good long while now.

i've read this. it's awesome

Solstice getting near. About time for ILB to break out its ice cream suit and start a new summer reading thread.

for a little while when i was a kid i would reread the susan cooper books at every solstice

Do your final dance around the maypole because Sumer Is Icumen In 2015, What Are You Reading Now?