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

Gillian Slovo: Ten Days -- novel about mass riots in the UK, heavily based on the 2011 outbreaks, based on lots of interviews with participants on both rioter and police sides. Interesting, but fairly pedestrian prose.

I spent the last week not reading Hume and instead reading David Brion Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. It’s a 1966 history of moral thinking about slavery, mainly concentrating on New World slavery up to the late 18th century. I learned a lot. I will definitely be reading the two sequel volumes on the "Age of Revolution" and the "Age of Emancipation" (the last one just came out in 2014).

charles stross, glasshouse -- solid sci-fi with some gender issues
geraldine brooks, year of wonders -- well-written and i am morbidly fascinated with the plague, but the protagonist was too saintly and the conclusion was quite a stretch
timothy snyder, bloodlands -- humanity deserves extinction

Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks.

http://i.imgur.com/QbBu6va.jpg

^Either that is carefully staged, or the owner of that bookshelf should be beaten without mercy.

Shkreli?

oh god, apparently it is Shkreli. How is that even possible?

just finished
Ben Yandell - The Honors Class: Hilbert's Problems and Their Solvers

a biography of mathematicians who solved some of 23 problems listed in 1900. Repitition is a problem: the standard story is a European who went to Germany for higher education, became a professor, and had to flee to America in the late 30s. Sometimes they go insane (e.g. Goedel would only eat his wife's food and starved to death when she was in the hospital.) The long chapter on Kolmogorov was quite interesting and I want to look into his work -- it has a lot of crossover with the later chaos/complexity theory.

Was interested in that because it won that one award for math writing and l really liked any of the other books I came across that had won it.

The prize is named after an ilx0r, I believe.

Muriel Spark: Symposium -- just started this, anatomy of a dinner party from hell, typically fine Spark nastiness

Carter Scholz: Gypsy -- SF novella about a desperate attempt to achieve interstellar travel, running up against all the non-negotiable indifference of physics and entropy. Really, really good and moving. Beautifull done, really, and takes only 100p where most writers would pad it out to 600 and do it much much worse. Can't recommend this highly enough, tbh. Sholz seems to have been writing since the 1980s, but hasn't published much.

'anatomy of a dinner party from hell' sounds like my shit

Recently started The Horse's Mouth, and right off it delivered: "Sun in a mist. Like an orange in a fried-fish shop." I was dimly aware of the trilogy, but not that this is vol. 3. Should I read the first two first?

Don't think so.

Muriel Spark: Symposium -- just started this, anatomy of a dinner party from hell, typically fine Spark nastiness

Carter Scholz: Gypsy -- SF novella about a desperate attempt to achieve interstellar travel, running up against all the non-negotiable indifference of physics and entropy. Really, really good and moving. Beautifull done, really, and takes only 100p where most writers would pad it out to 600 and do it much much worse. Can't recommend this highly enough, tbh. Sholz seems to have been writing since the 1980s, but hasn't published much.

Nakh - How is Wine for Dummies?

Carter Scholz also wrote criticism for The Comics Journal for a while

just started lucia berlin's a manual for cleaning women, read about 5/6 of the stories from it last night. it's really good. deadpan, funny, enigmatic at times, and grim - a lot of it has a kind of catholic texan or mexican setting.

catholic texmex

that is a lot of stories to read in one sitting

the wine for dummies book is at least playfully amusing given that said dummy is filmed drinking a bottle of wine retailing at....$11,995.00

there was an article about rupert murdoch where the hack describes him having (i think) kant's critique of judgment on his bookshelf and noted how choosing that instead of the critique of pure reason for example showed the depth of his erudition

that is a lot of stories to read in one sitting

they are quite short. i went from "not enjoying this too much" to being unable to stop. v good stories.

Recently started The Horse's Mouth, and right off it delivered: "Sun in a mist. Like an orange in a fried-fish shop." I was dimly aware of the trilogy, but not that this is vol. 3. Should I read the first two first?

I read them backwards starting w/horse's mouth, over several years, many books in between, still enjoyed. always something gained from chronology I suppose, but not necessary here.

see i got 'a manual for cleaning women' thinking it was going to be a much weirder sort of experience and when i realised i'd parsed the title wrong i put it down

(not a joke)

how did you read the title originally? i guess it's short stories in a fairly classic way.

i felt strange leaving it on my desk when the cleaner came in - it was the only book on an empty desk. i hid it a few weeks ago but became lax over time. hope she didn't find it and feel like she's in a horror movie.

'a manual for cleaning the dirt off women'

essentially yes! i had literally never heard the term 'cleaning woman', only 'cleaning lady'. i guess it's some sort of weird class thing.

i think i kind of read it both ways, though the story with that title makes it clear.

i would say "the cleaner" - think that's common in the uk, strange that it's freed itself from gender norms.

yes, certainly 'the cleaner' before 'cleaning lady'. but, again, 'cleaning woman', never. i had thought, perhaps, that the latter was american, but i guess not.

i guess like "dinner lady" or whatever is p common too. lollipop lady - did they have those in the us?

what's weird is that "lady" is more posh than "woman", right? lords and ladies. is it a case of posh people's shame causing them to give the person who cleans their house a grander title?

i'm from luton, mate, i don't know how american children get to school. i think it involves SUVs -- i think re lady vs woman it's to do with a particular sector of the lower middle class assuming a kind of affected posh shame, though, i don't know what actual posh people call them. 'scouts'.

it's interesting how totally wrong 'dinner woman' and 'lollipop woman' sound if you try those out, they don't even sound like valid english phrases

anyway so yeah i should actually read this book is what you're saying?

yeah it's good. recommend it.

we had lunch ladies here. at school.

i made a mental note of that book - along with the "hawk lady" book that i mention above - when it showed up on the NYT top ten of the year.

will keep that one in mind.

i'm doing a writing course at the moment and the first night the teacher used stories by lydia davis, kafka, ben marcus, and an irish writer called joanna walsh.

was familiar with the first 3 and i have joanna walsh's non-fiction book about staying in hotels, which i love, partly because i love hotels. there's a good extract here - http://granta.com/hotel-haunting/

but i really liked the two stories of walsh's he gave us - both from this: http://galleybeggar.co.uk/store/3am-books/fractals - it's kind of like lydia davis, sparse, sometimes feels personal to the writer, confessional at times.

http://i.imgur.com/Qpi4Jpj.gif
xpost

Lucia Berlin sounds remarkable, and very close to (current) home and past literary interests. With the Black Mountain connections, I'm surprised her name is unfamiliar to me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSEuQRf99xM

Thanks for the reassurances about reading The Horse's Mouth first, guys. Good interview here (and note, in right rail, other contributors to this Fall-Winter 1954-1955 issue, incl Andy Warhol already):
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5071/the-art-of-fiction-no-7-joyce-cary

Peter Stamm - All Days are Night
Elena Ferrante - Story of the Lost Child

I think those two are quite similar - all the big and small emotions are flattened as things that happen (almost more so in Ferrante, as the 'operatic' element kicks in) but for this Nothern and that Southern European author its life presented as processes the characters are made to go through. So the flight and to, then back, to where you come from in the Ferrante but also that alienation (coded as alienation) of characters drawn up by Stamm (there is a flight of sorts too). In both art and its practice is unable to save anyone, only providing punctuation as we carry on from time spent in life and the various jails it has to offer: failed marriages, oppressive families. Happiness is presented as moments of light from the cell window, at other points its solitary confinement.

I literally just bought that Stamm today

Didn't find the emotions to be flattened in The Neapolitan Novels, though obv we're meant to feel the onslaught of events, emotions, information/sensory overload at times---as Lila-Lina has those moments of maltdown, re "dissolving boundaries," when the rationalized order of things reminds us it's an illusion, and she lives in dread of this experience, as a control freak, but building to rebellion vs the bullshit promises/establishment of control etc--um, the other thing is, I read the books as they were published in the US, so had some breathing spells. Reading them one after another sounds flattening indeed, exhausting!

Although, according to interviews, the whole thing was written pretty quickly, and the narrator gives the impression of that, typing away while looking for Lila, or maybe still competing, trying to cover her ass vs. headlines OLD HALF-FORGOTTEN LIT CELEB BROAD'S OUTLIER LIFELONG FRENEMY SOURCE FOUND DEAD, EPIC SUICIDE NOTE TELLS ALL, as well as, as she pretty much admits, suddenly sees/is seized by a way to tell all and jump past the unknowable (is she really an opportunist hack? She can't know---views of literature do change, and change again---and we never see her earlier writing, just get "and then I wrote" paraphrasing, ditto with Lina, who is not the only control freak, eh first-person narrator---writing, as a pro or an outlier, is there as slippery fuel for development of central characters, wherever they go)(watch out, other characters)

Also watch out, readers---I don't rec reading nonstop.

i plan on reading all of them in one go. i am a fan of immersion. if its something worth immersing myself in.

I have all three and im going to read them all in row, about 100 pages in on the first

you and douglas adams have the same definition of trilogy, i take it.