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

Just got Women Crime Writers of the 1940s & 50s: eight novels in two volumes, edited by Sarah Weinberg, published by the Library of America. Several concise pages of introductory material here:
http://womencrime.loa.org/?page_id=187

Sarah Weinman, that is.

Nice line-up in that set:

Laura by Vera Caspary (1943) -- this was a bit arch for my tastes at the time, should re-read it
The Horizontal Man by Helen Eustis (1946) -- don't know this one
In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes (1947) -- great book
The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding (1947) -- also great, nicely claustrophobic
Mischief by Charlotte Armstrong (1950) -- don't know it
The Blunderer by Patricia Highsmith (1954) -- classic Highsmith nightmare material, really good
Beast In View by Margaret Millar (1955) -- very underrated writer
Fools’ Gold by Dolores Hitchens (1958) -- don't know it

starting on cortázar's first novel the winners

Patrck McGilligan - Young Orson
* Shakespeare - Julius Caesar

Shifted some stuff around near the bed which lead me to pick up Viv Albertine's Clothes, Clothes, Clothes , Music, Music, Music, Boys Boys, Boys which I started over Xmas again. I'm finding it very interesting. Just got as far as Viv becoming Mick Jones steady after Steve Jones tried to seduce her very unsubtly by demanding a blowjob off her. So punk is starting to happen. She's got a guitar that mick Jones helped her select but no sign of teh Slits as yet.

Still reading through the 4AD history Facing the Other Way which has got into the 90s and the generation or wave after Throwing Muses and Pixies. Still mainly reading this on buses which is why it's taking so long to get through, though book is a few hundred pages long.

& still reading Inside the Dream palace teh Chelsea Hotel history on the bog. Got as far as Warhol making films in the mid 60s so maybe about 1/2 way though the book.

åsne seierstad, "one of us"

I finished Guantanamo Diary. I imagine some day this will be assigned in schools as a cautionary tale of a time when America lots its moral compass, but maybe I'm being too optimistic. Slahi has a very appealing and relatable authorial voice, and even a subtle sense of humor. Some of the scenes are just so absurd that they must have happened: such as the guard who promises to watch a movie with Slahi before she gets transferred out of GTMO, and so on her last day they watch "Black Hawk Down" together.

Just finished our own Phil Dellio's collection Interrupting My Train of Thought, which I've been reading a few entries at a time over the last few months (I tend to always have a music and/or film book--and this one has a lot of both--on the go for breaks from my school reading as a means of sanity-preservation). Great stuff, with a bit of it coming from ILX. If you ILXers keep turning out such quality (published) writing--see also, Us Conductors, Wolf in White Vans, several 33 1/3 volumes--I'm gonna have to create a special ILX section on my bookshelf.

Oh, and I created a S*****y playlist with 194 of the songs mentioned in the book, in case anyone was looking for 14 hours of musical distraction or accompaniment.

Didn't know of Interrupting My Train of Thought, and not sure who he is on ilx, but i read the buying-nixon-books essay on the amazon preview pages and it seemed very promising

Tbh i dont know who ANYONE is on ilx, and can't keep track when people change their usernames, so he could be me for all i know

A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell. Had read the first two or three Dance... novels many years ago, but couldn't remember a damm thing about them, beyond the odd name (Widmerpool, Jenkins.) Now I can see much more clearly the humour in the writing, and the debt to Proust; very much enjoying the movement between England and France, school and university, childhood and adulthood, and so on. Planning on persevering with the whole sequence this time.

Am also in the process of moving, to a smaller flat, after eight years of accumulating...stuff...all in the same place. Looking at all these bloody boxes of books, the Kindle finally seems a LOT more appealing.

wait, Phil. D, right? i never knew that. until now.

"Tbh i dont know who ANYONE is on ilx,"

I'm me!

i was in a good book with lots of ilxors! if you've never read it i think you can probably find it for a penny on amazon.

Interrupting My Train of Thought is by the ilxor known as Clemenza, I think

ah, okay. i guess phil d. would have been too obvious.

Sorry--Interrupting My Train of Thought is indeed clemenza's.

What was this book with you and other ILXors, scott?

Have fun with Powell, Ward. I read the sequence in 2007, and while it was rewarding it wasn't as complex as I wanted. Widmerpool faded in and out of plausibility.

"What was this book with you and other ILXors, scott?"

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007FGT02Q/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?ie=UTF8&btkr=1

WITH ESSAYS BY: Matt Ashare * Tom Breihan * Aaron Burgess * Jon Caramanica * Daphne Carr * Jeff Chang * Ian Christie * Kandia Crazy Horse * John Darnielle * Laina Dawes * Geeta Dayal * Rob Harvilla * Jess Harvell * Michaelangelo Matos * Anthony Miccio * Amy Phillips * Dave Queen * Ned Raggett * Simon Reynolds * Chris Ryan * Scott Seward * Greg Tate * Derek Taylor * Douglas Wolk

9 or 10 ILXoRz!

xpost

Thanks Alfred - complex in terms of narrative incident and architecture, or in terms of profundity of thought (or both?)

Tbh i dont know who ANYONE is on ilx

I'm your favourite living author! I just need a small loan to publish my next book...

I have once again started War & Peace, after a couple of short failed attempts in college.

Kindle this time, went with the Briggs translation which is nice & breezy so far (maybe a bit *too* glib with modern turns of phrase but i aint mad)

I'll circle back in a month when i'm inevitably mired lol

GOOD LUCK AND GODSPEED. i don't think i could do it...

i cheated & watched the miniseries that just aired on tv, that way i can keep the names straight by having a face to picture. it's worked so far!

sooooo many names tho, jfc

there should be a kindle version where they turn all the names into jones, smith, etc.

mr veg suggested i give them nicknames lol

notepad.jpg

I'm away from home for several days and brought The Places In Between, Rory Stewart, which I've now begun, along with several alternates in case I get bored with it. So far, he manages to sketch his brief encounters with various Afghan officials, soldiers, and villagers with sufficient vividness that one gets distinct (if simple) ideas about them, rather than their being mere clichés of travel literature. His ability to speak Farsi and to cope with various local dialects of it certainly helps.

I'm currently reading Miriam Toews's All my Puny Sorrows; I've been reading it slowly, because this is probably not a great time in my life to be reading about suicidal depression (not to sound worrying), but I'm impressed with Toews's simultaneous lightness of tone and resistance to sentimentality. I'm also going slowly through Jane Bowles's letters in Out in the World: it's wonderful to have more of Bowles's prose, but there's a claustrophobic quality to the letters, which largely describe a life spent struggling against silence, and Jane's comparisons of her own work to Paul's are often painful to read.  I've also been reading Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow and Angela Davis's Abu Ghraib-era interviews in Abolition Democracy. The former is a brilliant and damning comment on the American legal system, but remains strangely tied to the discourse of liberal reformism and barely engages with abolitionist voices or the legacy of Black Power movements; the latter draws crucial connections between the prison industrial complex and militarism abroad, and makes me hope intensely that Davis still intends to finish her book on prisons.

I'm enjoying the Women Crime Writers of the 1940s & 50s set dow described upthread. I had some cognitive dissonance reading Laura because it was impossible not to visualize Lydecker as Clifton Webb even though he's described as a big fat guy with a van dyke. First-person narration by Lydecker, McPherson, and Laura adds some complexity not possible in the movie but also makes the proceedings less unified. I'm curious how this TCM Effect will influence my readings of In a Lonely Place and The Blank Wall (filmed as The Reckless Moment).

Think the film version ofIn A Lonely Place is supposed to be very different from novel? Haven't read it yet.
one way street, feel better, okay? Hope so. Speaking of Jane Bowles, I recently clicked on the collection Your Sister's Hand In Mine---most of which I've already read, but I know I'll buy it---and Amazon emailed me, thinking I might like these (among other more familiar suggestions):

Joy Williams, The Visiting Privilege: New and Collected Stories

Mina Loy, Insel(Neversink)

Neila Larsen, Passing

Leopoldine Core, When Wretched: Stories

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New Edition)

Larbi Layachi, A Life Full of Holes

Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

Millicent Dillon, A Little Original Sin: The Life of Jane Bowles

Anybody read 'em?

Passing and Sleepless Nights are both very good. Aimless a little upthread was reading Passing, too.

Nightwood is an acquired taste, one I was unable to acquire. Have the Loy but haven't read it yet.

I've been curious about Insel, have a copy of Nightwood around that I've been meaning to read.

Currently slowly going through The Siege of Krishnapur by JG Farrell, it's not as entrancing as Troubles so far but what is?

didn't know mina loy had written a novel! need to acquire a copy asap.

i liked nightwood fine, but i really liked that collection of early stories virago press put out.

xposts: further suggestion based on your list, h.d.'s fiction is well worth a read too.

Yeah, the stories were much more my thing than Nightwood.
http://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9780860685869-us.jpg

Weirdly, both the Loy books I've got have the same cover. I mean, when the photo is that cool I see why you use it...
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1564786307.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/1612193536.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Joy Williams is one of my favorite living authors, but i don't know what is in that collection. but i would read it no matter what was in it.

okay, 13 stories never collected before. will buy that when i see it somewhere. i've been meaning to RE-read her stuff for ages. cuz it's been awhile for the older collections. i have almost everything. missing a few things. don't have her guidebook to the Florida Keys, but i would buy it if i saw it.

i just think it's cool that they would put a huge retrospective volume like that out in 2015. so many people who have been writing as long as she has get lost in the shuffle. and its not like her stuff ever sold like crazy.

Ack, not When Wretched, it's When Watched!

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51FPbbyBtKL._SX330_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Wondered why I couldn't find it--Amazon just kept suggesting Magic: The Gathering cards when I looked for it, which seemed peculiar

reading Patrick Modiano -- here's what I posted on Facebook earlier this week:

Very strange, after the subdued & reflective tone of the three novellas collected in the volume 'Suspended Sentences', to go all the way back to "La Place de l"etoile" (the author's debut), a wildly uneven postmodern goof of a book, about a thinly characterized self-loathing Jew who is simultaneously obsessed with & repulsed by the French "national character" (not excluding its virulent anti-semitism) -- e.g. at one point, he beats up his provincial schoolmates for being insufficiently reverent towards the canon of minor French novelists, then in the next chapter finds himself drawn into an international scheme to abduct and traffic French girls from the countryside, which he abandons halfheartedly before chapter's end. I'm not finished with it yet, but this is a lot closer to the angry settling-of-scores I was expecting from Modiano, who wears his fascination with the occupation and its collaborators on his sleeve; I'm curious to see how the ambitious 22 year-old author of "La Place..." grew & evolved through the other two novels collected here.

Yes, been meaning to check him out!
Haven't seen anything by Joy Williams in a long time, but her early stories incl. subtle displacement, more or less in passing ---somebody can't find their $1000 sunglasses, early 70s $---never mind. the author's got some other lenses---then her first novel, State of Grace, where the opening monologue was somebody carefully pulling a cloud of images out of her ear, then they all settle into focus, oh shit (nominated for National Book Award, as well it might have been, lost to Gravity's Rainbow).

Finished "La Place de l'étoile" last night -- a strange book indeed. Pastiche of Celine & parody of Proust eventually give way to Kafka, as the shifts in tense & narrative perspective (from first- to third-, even occasionally second-person) become so frequent & jarring, sometimes within a single paragraph, that he had begun to suspect incompetence on the part of the translator &/or proofreader.

åsne seierstad, "one of us"

"one of us"? Like in Freaks?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/books/review/asne-seierstads-one-of-us-about-rampage-in-norway.html