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

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

Marilynne Robinson's Lila, which I enjoyed and admired but didn't love, not like Gilead. Great writing as usual, I liked the character, didn't mind that the whole book was just the sustained note of her thoughts. Maybe I just got a bit fed up with Ames saying he'd been thinking about why God allows good people to suffer for the best part of his seventy-plus years, but give him a few more days and he might just crack it. I do wonder how much my conception of her books differs from her own, she does an incomparable job of humanising religious thought - I never would have imagined enjoying the ramblings of an old preacher half as much as I do - but for her there will still be the greater truth behind it.

I've been reading Chekhov short stories from the Penguin classics volume titled Lady with Lapdog and Other Stories.

Yesterday I also started to read a self-published memoir I found at the local charity shop. It has an ISBN, but even if I noted it here, I doubt anyone would ever run across a copy anywhere for any reason. It takes place in NE Oregon, where the author grew up on a ranch a couple of dozen miles north of the Wallowa mountains - a place where I love to hike for weeks every summer.

It is all very quotidian, the sorts of stories rural families accumulate, about the time Uncle Dan rode at the front of the July 4th parade and his horse bucked him off, or when the salamander plugged up the drain pipe and the kitchen flooded. (NB: neither of these stories are in the book.) Still I like reading such things from time to time. They are generally very soothing.

What a strange coincidence. Just glanced at an electronic copy of that memoir this morning, which was open on my laptop, but didn't have a chance to really plow through. Got to wondering about the origin of the word Wallowa, whether it was related to Walla Walla, then got to up to look for a book on Chief Joseph which come to think of if I didn't actually get.

Bruce Bawer - Prophets & Professors: Essas on the lives and Works of Modern Poets
* Scott Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night
Joseph Roth - The Emperor's Tomb
J. Hoberman - The Dream Life

Found it

wondering about the origin of the word Wallowa

I can answer that. There is a book called Oregon Geographical Names, by Lewis MacArthur that records the origin. It comes from a Nez Perce word describing a kind of weir they built of osier willow to trap fish. A large fish trap was built at the outlet of Wallowa Lake (a huge 5 mile long glacial lake), which gave the lake and the river their name. Decades later, it was also given to the mountain range behind the lake and to Wallowa County.

reading The Recollection by Gareth L. Powell. never heard of him. Paul Cornell says that Gareth Powell is going to be a major voice in SF. never heard of Paul Cornell either. Colin Harvey and Warren Ellis are also big fans of this book. never heard of them either. they could have all been in Supergrass as far as i know.

anyway, it IS a page-turner. two stories at once with alternating chapters. and nice and simple to follow for a simpleton like me.

Scoop: Boot's just now gotten his two passports to Ishmaelia. Everybody's ridic, but so far, spacey white sons of Empire are left behind by enterprising Negroes and Women, especially the networking beauty in the tiny black car(s), who knows no bounds, it seems. Not so much zings as short, sharp, storytime jabs, tirelessly delivered by Johnny Ramone.

Paolo Sorrentino, Youth: novel written simultaneously with the making of the same story as a movie, and unforunately this is very obviously the script given the minutest amount of effort needed to turn it into prose, and not very good prose either. Hope the film is better

Shūsaku Endō, White Man: told as the memoirs of a cross-eyed sadist Nazi collaborator in Lyon, just before the Nazis flee the oncoming Allies. Like a minimalist version of Tournier's Erl-King/Ogre

Helle Helle, This Should Be Written i the Present Tense: intertia-struck Danish woman lets her life go to bits, pretends to go to uni, cheats on boyfriend, etc. Actually very good! Apparently she is Denmark's most popular novelist, despite/because of having identical first and last names

2Stoned Andrew Loog Oldham's 2nd volume of memoir. Here he starts pretty loosely chronologically then goes back to touring the US with the Stones in 65 or 6. Think it's forward from there so Immediate etc coming.

Got Inside the Dream Palace on the Chelsea Hotel as my bog book at the moment. Only got as far as plans to build it in the 19th century so far. Need to get a bookmark for it so I don't waste time lonking for my page.
Also need to finish Ford Maddox Ford which I was about 2/3 through before Xmas.

& I have the 4AD bio Facing The Wrong Way as my travel etc book for buses etc. Got as far as Prayers on Fire or possibly a little after. Interesting so far anyway.

with Scandinavia in the rearview mirror for now here's my latest library haul:

Christopher Hitchens - And Yet
Brian Moore - The Mangan Inheritance
Stacy Schiff - The Witches: Salem 1692
Mary Gatskill - Veronica

I read the Gaitskill in November and got the Hitchens as an Xmas present to myself.

Finished Moby Dick - really incredible: such a weird book, so audacious with its content and language. Just made what was pretty much a perfect xmas period even better.

Ernesto Sabato - The Tunnel. Read this in a single, long-ish commute. Starts off with the plot of The Outsider, demystifies and amplifies it into his own achievement.

really enjoyed your thoughts on Robinson, ledge - her thinking seems so worth reflecting on, worth the time to draw out. I haven't done Lila yet bought bought it in hardback as soon as it came out because Gilead, that's just one of those books that sticks with you.

I'm reading Blindness, having just finished Cain, I love Saramago to pieces and may do The Gospel According to Jesus Christ next

I've recently enjoyed a few addiction memoirs (White Out by Michael Clune), Blackout by Sarah Hepola) & looking for another heroin one I read Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson which I think I heard of in the 90s & wow that was not really my thing at all.

I got a heap of books for Christmas, so it's been my new year's resolution to read more. Right now I'm reading Marlon James' 'A History of Seven Killings', which of course is on everyone's radar but is definitely really really good. Also tucking into Steven Pinker's 'Sense of Style' which is one of the best books on the English language and writing I've ever come across.

really enjoyed your thoughts on Robinson, ledge

Thanks! Let me know what you think when you get round to it.

Eve Babitz - Eve's Hollywood: a NYRB reissue. Pretty artless but very entertaining

I saw that and its rave reviews, but I didn't like the little bit I read.

But now your description sort of makes me want to read it.

Oh man, the NYRB holiday sale catalog had a bunch of blurbs casting her as the Anti-Didion, or the younger, fun Didion: she still tattled on the tails of Tinsel Town, but she was young and fun you bet. However, I also read a bunch of excerpts meant to sell this same point (in Paris Review, I think), and I never say this but omg LOL what a self-satisfied self-indulgent klutzy sisassypants she seems to be. So cute how she never bothered to look up correct spellings of common words contained in her semi-zingers, all her friends seemly agree. Was she some kind of ironic fave, like William Hung etc.?

But you know NYRB and Paris Review, so maybe I should give her more of a chance.

er "sassypants," "seemingly" (blush, but bet she typed too fast too!)

All of that is kind of true, and yet and yet and yet... Partly it is just that her anecdotes are actually very interesting, no matter how they're told

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?