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

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?