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

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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

Jonasson - The 100 year old man who etc. etc.
For a book club, which I didn't attend because I was sick. But, I'm 2/3rds through so I might as well finish. It has two parts: a ridiculous adventure yarn where the title character kills a team of criminals one by one, either accidentally or in somewhat self defense; and Forrest Gump, the movie, where staying out of politics is a position spelled out by having every -ist get killed, while the title dude survives by not being into politics -- a stupid philosophy that is not conducive to comedy.

The laundrette in my new building has a bookshelf with a copy of that, I wasn't tempted to read it because I saw the film and it was unadulterated waste

really enjoying 'europe in autumn'; thanks to fizzles and james m. for mentioning its sequel

Joy Williams is one of my favorite living authors

_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._

This latter sounds great, thanks. Spark sounds good too, don't think I ever got round to reading that one.

Didnt actually mean KSR--I enjoyed his starship novel last year too, though I think Gypsy was a bit better--just referring to SF novel bloat in general, where the material for a cracking short story or novella is bulked up unnecessarily for the market. See also literary fiction too, I guess.

Anyway, I'm glad Gypsy and Europe in Autumn are getting some love!

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/12/short-story-collection-smuggled-out-of-north-korea-global-interest-bandi

not sure what to think of this, but I'll give it a chance. fun to try to draw the line between realism and fiction.

Another vote for Sleepless Nights, would like to read again someday. Seem to remember a really good description of seeing Billy Holiday. Also enjoyed what I have read of her Collected Short Stories.

The title of the other one I am thinking of is actually The New York Stories f Elizabeth Hardwick.

NYRB Winter Sale---50 books at 50% off (wondering about Poets In A Landscape and Pages From The Goncourt Journals)(maybe the Cendrars):

http://www.nyrb.com/collections/winter-sale?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Winter%20Sale&utm_content=NYR%20Winter%20Sale+CID_093896182073cb3e11f6921e1ab46742&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=Browse%20the%20books

An early version of the Billie Holiday chapter in Sleepless Nights is available here, incidentally, and it conveys the tone of the book fairly well: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1976/03/04/billie-holiday/

Didnt actually mean KSR--I enjoyed his starship novel last year too, though I think Gypsy was a bit better--just referring to SF novel bloat in general, where the material for a cracking short story or novella is bulked up unnecessarily for the market. See also literary fiction too, I guess.

Anyway, I'm glad Gypsy and Europe in Autumn are getting some love!

Started into 131 by Julian Cope this morning after finishing the Viv Albertine book last night. Very touching that Viv Albertine.
131 is a bit more comical using Cope's usual idiomatic style, not sure how much of that is sui generis. I haven't really come across any people who talk like that myself but there you go.
THink I've read a number of people struggling with the book so not sure how far I'll go with it since I do have a number of other things I want to read, but so far so good.

Philip Schultz: The Wherewithal. -- verse novel about (deep breath) the Holocaust, Polish pogroms, the Zodiac killer, Vietnam War, a kafkaesque take on wirking in californian social security, being an inadvertant murderer... Very good, but somewhat overstuffed, and not everything quite meshes together

you had me at holocaust followed by zodiac killer

:Picked up Children of the Revolution out of the debris around my bed and started into that again. Just read a history of Mott The Hoople up to All The Young Dudes that has me wanting to pick up physical copies of their lps.

glad to see your debris field is bearing fruit; I still need to find time to weed out the library books from mine

stevo, Mott's Brain Capers was one of my most-played albums of and in the 70s, but most of their LPs were good. if sometimes uneven, incl the comps-with-rarities, Rock & Roll Queen and Greatest Hits. Live, recorded on Broadway, improves on some early studio tracks, and is mesmerizing overall (or was; haven't listened to any of their records in a long time). It's much longer on CD, but I haven't listened to their CDs at all. Nevertheless, they play themselves in my head fairly often.

Yeah was listening to soundfiles of Brain Capers yesterday. Pretty great.

About time I got through the Dave Thompson book though since it's been somewhere around my bedroom for the last couple of years.
& I should know more about the Glam scene really since I do enjoy bits and pieces from that era.

While sticking my head pretty far into in The Horse's Mouth, also thinking I need to get John Berger's A Painter of Our Time, and this---anybody read it?
http://brooklynrail.org/2016/02/art_books/john-berger-on-artists