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

lmao @ literary seinfeldism

i like those long articles i have read by knausgaard but there is no way i would ever read those books.

vol.5 and/or 6 is about Brevik and Hitler, a section of that sounds like one of those excellent essays he has been knocking off so I am looking forward to that.

Thanks for Wittgenstein's still very relevant take on Frazer, Fizzles. Recalls my impressions of Dawkins, Maher, Hitchens and many lesser lights on Isalm, for inst.

I also like this:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/modernism_in_sf

Even better, I think:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/postmodernism_and_sf

Lots of links in those; I just now read this, which seems pretty astute:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/ballard_j_g

I too was just now thinking about Ballard, but it was while I was staring at this picture🔗. Aviation, crashes, filming, death.

why i want to fuck noel edmonds.

it's the trad ballard plot - smith is the professional drawn into the orbit of the charismatic psychopath edmonds, climax is Smith crashing a helicopter with his wife beside him.

this fits somewhere

Finished Percival Everett, ERASURE (2001). Terrifically intelligent and challenging novel.

Love that book. He's an a,amazingly versatile writer. Have you read anything else of his?

I have not yet! But very impressed by this one. So much in it.

I was going to comment: I love KAFKA AMERICANA.

Knausgaard's comment above about death relating to the ground seemed not that ridiculous to me, on the face of it. But I haven't read his books and thus can't understand what he does or why, yet.

I just started Northanger Abbey last night. The straightforward pleasure of Austen's narrative voice is hard to beat.

Been trying to get back into reading for fun (yet again, I have breaks for various reasons, often involving academia or depression). Recent reads have involved some classics that I have inexplicably ignored, a couple of my beloved experimentals, and some things I never thought I would ever read but ended up loving.

A rough list of the last few months from memory:

Sophocles - Oedipus Rex + Oedipus at Colonus (not got around to Antigone yet)
Margaret Atwood - Oryx & Crake (goodish but a bit underwhelming, for some reason I never read the Handmaid's Tale at school so my mum has loaned me it to read soon)
James Baldwin - Giovanni's Room
Raymond Roussel - Locus Solus
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
Georges Perec - W, or the Memory of Childhood
Patrick Ness - Chaos Walking trilogy (my YA-loving friend lent these to me, they are young adult sci-fi books and I really really like them, got some quite high-concept stuff going on while remaining very accessible for kids/teens)
Christine Brooke-Rose - Xorandor (and just started Verbivore)

I think there might have been a couple of others recently that I have forgotten. That's one problem of getting back into reading at a relatively high speed (though I'm probably still slower than most of you) - I forgot that I need at least a couple of days between books to let them settle in. Also I have such a bad memory it's feasible that I might have posted about some of these before.

finished a cortázar collection from the late sixties/early seventies (a change of light & other stories). some almost straight up horror and hard-boiled pulp type stuff mixed in with the more recondite material... wasn't so sure about the one with the ghost of chopin thwarting the invasion of an unnamed latin american country, but otherwise some good stuff in there.

then some early bolaño: the skating rink & nazi literature in the americas (really liked the latter & going to have to find a copy of distant star)

now: perec's things, a story of the sixties

also, i really need to read some roussel!

Emil.y, i think you've hit some real gems in your return to reading! Giovannis room and invisible cities are wonderful books. And you remind me i need to dig out that christine brooke-rose book i bought when that thread about her was revived, and then never got round to reading.

Handmaids tale is not a perfect book, but still a very very effective one. By far her best SF work (though i say that as someone who thinks the rest of her SF is actually pretty risible)

Packing for a long spell of nomadism, think I can manage a bag of books (everything else goes into storage tomorrow). How do you decide what books to take? It's maddening. And I can't find anything in the damn boxes.

Might take Invisible Cities with me, if I can find it - one of my favourites.

no lime tangier, some Cortázar and Bolaño works coming up soon on my list of "books I bought ages ago but still haven't read", so I think we might have very similar reading interests. Definitely recommend Roussel, both Locus Solus and New Impressions of Africa.

I'd never read any James Baldwin before and adored Giovanni's Room, have since picked up some of his non-fiction, so hopefully will get around to that soon.

One book that I did forget to list was Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo - very sharp Afrofuturist satire with excellent formal elements.

I've read a couple of bolano's books, and I have 2666 or whatever sitting somewhere if I can find it. Grr.

hrabal is hilarious

He sure is.

I want to read James Baldwin later this year too.

So I finished Pages from the Goncourt Journals. So much in here, even though its very much the chronicle of two people who gave their lives to one thing: literature - partly because that's what they were good at (and not much else; women were such an obsession because they were a mystery - almost alien beings), but also because the stuff they were writing about like Flaubert and Zola was the stuff that 'won'. So while the subject is cult (Lit in general is a minority interest) they display a tabloid-like ear for both dialogue and speculation - people's lives and tribulations. A snatch of conversation that lingers on for long after you've read it. Something from his cousin:

Just imagine: they [the cousin's rural family] are people who for five generations have married for love

But there is are bits indicating a panorama of Paris in the 19th Century: one of the brothers - Jules - dies (at 39) Edmond carries on (3/4 of this is Edmond) and the entries surrounding his brother's death are touching and dignified. The Paris Commune starts up and this is chronicled as engagingly as what he is usually interested in.

But literature is what they gave themselves and there are insights at what the coming century will bring. The feud with Maupassant (his descent into madness and death doesn't stop Edmond from pissing away in his grave, but the charge of Flaubert minus sticks). There are snatches of a hilarious portrait of Mallarme, just this person that is beyond any comprehension. Edmond notes the weirdness of Baudelaire and so on. And then:

I am interested in novels in which I can feel the transcription in print, so to speak, of creatures in flesh and blood, in which I can read a little or a great deal of the memoirs of a life that has been lived

Where so much 20th century fic goes to (and where these Journals have been in although ironically you get a sense the life is often frustrating, in a they-are-rich-but-are-they-happy sorta way)

and regarding novels about high society:

...but unfortunately, to write novels or plays about that world you mustn't belong to it

Which is basically Proust.

I have finished some other things. Margerite Duras - The Vice-Consul. I love her devices for uncovering so much pain, but that whole world of people who went away (in this case to South Asia, where she grew up in) to get away and were lost. Almost dangerous in the wrong mood but the distancing and the drawing of characters who conceal as much as reveal keeps the reader marching on - the timing between both modes is really well done. The films based on this stuff just increase the fascination. Jean Rhys - Voyage in the Dark has sentences so worked over, which is v apt as it mirrors that sense of someone being suffocated, of being unable (and unwilling) to fit in - before outside forces inevitably distort and crush the already fragile sense of self and resistance and search for love and fulfillment. I've read a few of her fictions but also feel I am getting just started with Rhys. It takes time. Finally Han Kang - Human Acts. I loved The Vegetarian, where resistance and opposition was dramatised as a simple dietary switch. Here this is a lot more full-on, this time its a journalistic novel surrounding the repression of student uprisings in early 80s South Korea by the military government. I get it but also find it kinda stiff, kept thinking to my earlier read of Alexiviech's Voice of Chernobyl, how she is able to set and let oppressed voices fly away and speak and simply be whatever they are able to be at that time. Something I need to reflect more on.

Wow--loved 'The Vegetarian', didn't even know she had another book in English. It sounds interesting, even if not fully successful. Is it the same translator as Vegetarian?

Yeah, I should read more Duras, having loved The Lover, but maybe I haven't because I also found myself thinking that she knew a lot about guys like me. But finally---with most bridges, burned or not, having dissolved---what could words hurt-?

Also, have any of y'all read Simone de Beauvoir's The Mandarins? What did you think? And what's a good English translation of The Second Sex?

I've only read the Parshley translation, but according to Toril Moi, both of the available translations of The Second Sex have their problems (the earlier Parshley version is significantly abridged, while the newer version by Borde and Malovany-Chevallier is sometimes stilted and inaccurate): http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n03/toril-moi/the-adulteress-wife

han kang sounds like someone i need to read

i have been reading the wake. the novel in invented anglo saxon from a year or two ago, not the other thing

also eve babitz's memoir, which was delightful

renata adler's selected journalism or essays or whatever they called it, which as a collection was terribly organized (though i guess ... they had what they had) despite some fantastic writing. though the first couple pieces, the civil rights one and the israel one, seem ... curiously naive (or, possibly, so arch i'd totally failed to parse it); i'd put it down in frustation at those but the national guard and g. gordon liddy stuff was fantastic. i don't know if i needed 200 pages of jeremiads against the supreme court and the new york times, but they certainly weren't bad --

what else. zuleika dobson, re which: i am adopting a policy: if anyone tells you they think this book is not terrible, never trust them again

Wow--loved 'The Vegetarian', didn't even know she had another book in English. It sounds interesting, even if not fully successful. Is it the same translator as Vegetarian?

― like Uber, but for underpants (James Morrison), Monday, 29 February 2016 00:40 (9 hours ago) Permalink

Yes. Deborah Smith has started a press for fictions from the South Asia as well:

http://tiltedaxispress.com/

And I think she is doing a new book by Bae Suah too.

xposts: thanks for the roussel recommendations, emil.y... the little i know about his work comes via robbe-grillet's short essay and reading somewhere or other about the surrealists' early appreciation of him.

Knausgaard's comment above about death relating to the ground seemed not that ridiculous to me, on the face of it. But I haven't read his books and thus can't understand what he does or why, yet.

it was the ambiguity of his speculation about why this is that i found ridiculous, though i don't expect you to read posts.

Speaking of Northanger Abbey, I'm reading Frances Burney's Evelina.

Many similarities to Austen, although she seems to drag us even deeper into the madness, the rules upon rules of good manners, of language, interpreting meaning based on slight nods, shifts, having to live with snobs and fops of the most vapid kind who use and abuse these rules. Not to say it's an always subtle dance - the intensity with which the men of the book harass our heroine is something else - observing her fighting off one suitor after another is great fun, but also surprisingly violent. She paints a picture of a society where male sexual aggression taking even threatening physical form is the norm - in 'quality' upper class company. Of course she falls in love with the only guy in the book who isn't up in her face.

The book can be hysterically funny. What she definitely shares with Austen is the ability to make crystallized weapons out of sentences and build up to the most vivid descriptions of idiocy.

Great stuff.

Also a sweet peek into the fashionable London of the late 1700s with all its gardens and venues of entertainment.

When the curtain dropt they all rejoiced.

"How do you like it?"-and "How do you like it?" passed from one to another with looks of the utmost contempt. "As for me," said Mr. Branghton, "they've caught me once; but if ever they do again, I'll give 'em leave to sing me to Bedlam for my pains: for such a heap of stuff never did I hear: there isn't one ounce of sense in the whole opera, nothing but one continued squeaking and squalling from beginning to end."

"If I had been in the pit," said Madame Duval, "I should have liked it vastly, for music is my passion; but sitting in such a place as this, is quite unbearable."

Miss Branghton, looking at me, declared, that she was not genteel enough to admire it.

Miss Polly confessed, that, if they would but sing English, she would like it very well.

The brother wished he could raise a riot in the house, because then he might get his money again.

And, finally, they all agreed that it was monstrous dear.

evelina is a fantastic novel. captain mirvan's incessant trolling of lovel is a++.

And of course the only-sometimes innocent Evelina was "compelled to laugh" at his dirtiest trick.

yes, i love Evelina. that's the only Burney I've read.

I've got her journals and letters lined up next, but itching to read the next novel.

xposts: thanks for the roussel recommendations, emil.y... the little i know about his work comes via robbe-grillet's short essay and reading somewhere or other about the surrealists' early appreciation of him.

― no lime tangier, Monday, February 29, 2016 10:55 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If that's the guy I think it is I have a biography of him somewhere I bought a few years ago that I never read.
Isn't he the mega rich guy who supposedly travelled the world on a cruise ship but never left his cabin.

Made me think of l ron hubbard rather than roussel!

reading some good stuff

updike - of the farm
rupinder gill - on the outside looking indian
greg Jackson - prodigals

i always argue with a specific friend of mine about patents/ip law even though none of us know anything about is aside from intuition and folk anecdata (someone patented the peanut butter sandwich, etc) so i bought 3 books on patents/innovation policy and we're gonna cycle read them. i'm starting with the first

james bessen and michael j meurer - patent failure
- pro patents in theory but critical of practice especially since 90s when patent litigation has exploded. very empirical focus

michele boldrin and daniel k levine - against intellectual monopoly
true to their thesis this book is available for free download on their website http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.htm

mariana mazzucato - the entrepreneurial state
less directly related to patents but more generally about the positive role of the state in innovation (internet, us gov actually made a profit off solyndra, etc etc)

Currently reading the lovely pocket-sized Pushkin Press translation of Un beau ténébreux by Julien Gracq, a writer with whom I was not previously familiar. Very lyrical & beautifully written novels set at beach resorts are not typically my thing, but this one is scratching an itch for me...

When we read Evelina in my 18th century lit course twenty years ago the class liked it more than any Austen.

xp (I say "not typically my thing" because the opening chapters of one of my very favorite novels, Thomas l'obscur, could almost be read as a parody of the tendency observed in Gracq & others)

February was so dismal for reading. I couldn't concentrate on anything. This was after getting through about seven books in January. In the last couple days I've read some Edgar Allen Poe and Georges Simenon and this seems to be working.

In a "Ask Greil" response on greilmarcus.net, GM mentions some novels:

02/15/16
...Jonathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet, the best rock-band novel, even though in the course of the book they barely perform. Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document, about the sixties as a teenage boy’s blessing or curse decades after the fact. People swooned over Lauren Groff’s ginned-up, unbelievable-from-either-side Fates and Furies—or felt they had to, as the incandescent, uncanny Arcadia was ignored. It’s one of the great excavations of hidden American history in fictional form and a story where absolutely nothing is predictable.

GM OMT--You Don't Love Me Yet is underrated.

Sounds interesting.

Review of the latest Dan Spiotta book led me to the link i posted here: Luna

Recently:

 Johnson, Alaya Dawn: A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’I (Novella) - award-nominated SF vampire/human power relationships exploration; not bad
 Bertino, Marie-Helene: Safe as Houses {Stories) - really good short stories, with a lot of surreal elements
 Rosenkrantz, Linda: My Life as a List (Memoir) - from the woman who did 'Talk', as recently NYRB-resurrected; brief, charming memoir of being a Jewish kid in the Bronx in WW2, occasionally suspecting her mother was a spy for Hitler
 Joseph, Paterson: Sancho: An Act of Remembrance (Play) - really good monologue about the life of the slave-born multi-talented composer/writer/actor who was friends with/championed by, among others, Laurence Sterne and Samuel Johnson, among others
 Scholz, Carter: Radiance (Novel) - sole solo novel by new ILB favourite, really good and grim, office politics in the nuclear war industry during the time of Reagan/Bush 1's SDI frolic

Please forgive wanky formatting, have c&p-ed from a list I'm trying to keep to remember what I've read at the end of the year

it's frustrating to me that they look like tickboxes

Just finished October in 1966 by Jon Savage. Pretty interesting really.

Just had Sid get arrested for the Death of Nancy in Inside the Dream Palace.

& Ivo has sold 4AD in Facing The Other Way

There's not much point in making brief commendatory comments on a Jane Austen novel, but I finished Northanger Abbey and, of course, it is chock full of small perfections and excellences.

I did find it a shame that Austen put her normally level-headed heroine through several pages of acting like a ninny, merely to score some editorial points against Gothic romances. It would have been a better novel if she'd omitted that minor piece of it, as it was superfluous to the plot and pulled her main character out of character.

JUst found taht my local remainder/2nd hand bookshop has got a range of Michael Moorcok books from 2 years back in these include anthologies of several of his characters including a Jerry Cornelius short fiction thing which I'll go back for. But I just bought a copy of THe Nomad of Time.
THink i'll be back for several others,
Maybe this should have gone more in the recent purchases thread cos it might takle me a while to actually read these.

After I finish the 4AD history I'll probably get back into the copy of Stoned2 by Andrew Loog Oldham I started before Xmas. BUt I have been meaning to read more Moorcock for a while. Though do wish I had got through more of him in my teens or 20s.