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

As much as I love ornate prose, Banville often reads like a parody of orotund expression. I still recommend The Untouchable though -- the concise British version of Harlot's Ghost.

Yeah, Banville over-writes. I will say "The Book of Evidence" is a good read though.

Yeah, The Sea, might try some more. How are the mystery novels? Wondering about the Banville in his pseudonym's approach to genre.

The mystery novels are dour and a bit dull. I really rate The Untouchable, Book of Evidence and the Revoltions trilogy.

never been tempted to read him. have looked in his books. put them down.

Likewise. Even the one(s) written under a pen name.

other people i have never read: a.s. byatt, margaret drabble, maeve binchy, nadine gordimer, iris murdoch, doris lessing.

think i started a few by doris lessing and never finished them. these are just off the top of my head. there are a lot more where that came from!

wait, is the other Sea one the iris murdoch Sea one?

why don't i read iris murdoch? i'd probably like her.

you're not actually allowed to read both byatt and drabble. if you do they come round your house to make you pick a side

i think i started to read possession and just knew right at the start i was never gonna read it.

After finishing Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted, which was readable, but a bit of a jumble, I have been reading an obscure H.G. Wells novel forming part of a Collected Works that I purchased for $1.99 for my Kindle, called The War in the Air. (I may be misrembering this and only succeeding in producing a paraphrase of the title.) It shows Wells' characteristic strengths (strongly imagined) and weaknesses (rather trashy and flashy, a bare notch above A Boy's Own Paper).

Scott, i think you would like Byatt's short stories, maybe Elementals or Little Black book

Drabble's really good: again, though, start with her stories--there was a collected edition a couple of years ago

Iris murdoch not so much. If it wasnt for her husbands industrious airbrushing of her memory, shed already be well out of print. Not very convincing fictions as vehicles for putting across dud philosophical systems.

i've been a little stalled with the 2nd ferrante book but its not her fault really i just keep picking up jazz crit and jazz interviews to read and every time i go back to elena those guys are STILL at the beach and i'm beginning to worry that those guys are never going home and are just gonna go swimming for the rest of their lives. i think maybe 20 or 30 less pages of the beach might have been good. it doesn't help that they keep talking about Beckett because then it just reminds me that i always stall out with him too.

wrt to Gordimer and Lessing you might need more context in terms of the politics of Southern Africa from that time. I really enjoyed both and especially want to read more Lessing this year.

I read Murdoch's The Bell last week, my third Murdoch. Ponderous but worthwhile. I wonder if anyone reads her generally.

i think maybe 20 or 30 less pages of the beach might have been good

yeah that bit dragged for me, don't worry there's plenty of abuse and misery to come.

Kind of stalled myself for a little bit, but have finished the second Brooke-Rose, dipped into some Stein, and am actually just about to go in for some Lessing myself. Another loan from my mum - this time Memoirs of a Survivor, as it was the first Lessing she read (and so it will be mine).

I thought the beach part was fun (also fateful, of course), but then I enjoyed the whole saga. Think EF's got a sly, dark sense of humor. Never read much Lessing set in South Africa, but maybe try The Golden Notebook. Also The Four-Gated City, but only when you're actually craving another long-ass read. She did write several shorter novels, but I haven't read 'em.
Speaking of Murdoch, gave my Professor Emeritus Mom's copy of The Red and the Green the Random Read Test, seemed like it might be okay. Mom? "Not up to Spark." She keeps doing that. " Hey, I finally read 100 Hundred Years of Solitude." "Eh, Borges is better."

Hey, I finally read 100 Hundred Years of Solitude." "Eh, Borges is better."

This is a huuuuuuuuuge truth, though.

jeez mom, it's not a competition

They specialised in different trades.

re: Lessing - I talked about Southern Africa not South Africa.

I really want to read The Four-Gated City, but its part of the Children of Violence cycle? Can you read 'em in any order?

Right, she was from what was then Southern Rhodesia, sorry. I haven't read the previous volumes of Children of Violence, and don't remember that many explicit references to the heroine's life in Africa. It works pretty well as a free-standing novel, starting with her arrival in early 50s London, which is still affected in a lot of ways by WWII, also the early Cold War. Goes on 'til 1997 (published in 1969).

They specialised in different trades.

Fair comment. I just remember being intensely disappointed by 100YoS, whereas Borges got hold of me from the first sentence I read and has never let me go.

yeah it's kind of a dumb comparison no offense to anyone's mom

I think they are quite far apart in what they write/talk about. The writers I group the most w/Marquez are Juan Rulfo and Sabato, perhaps they are the ones whose writing has a similar sensibility to Borges (especially Rulfo) but were approaching what Marquez was going to expand on.

I really love Borges too - and I am disappointed (so far) by people like Bioy and then Schwob (whom people say Borges perhaps aped - well I can see what people mean but Borges improved on it). I am going to eventually get round to Arlt and Ocampo and hope they'll be better. xp

She liked Marquez, but got tired of teaching him, never ever got tired of Borges, that's all it seems to come down to. I enjoy them both, but also got hooked on JLB immediately, yes.

not read any lessing yet, but have been intending to read briefing for a descent into hell since i was, um, sixteen (also happens to be one of the two books i can identify on the cover of the first fripp & eno record)

I only have an MP3 of that so its a nice detail

She liked Marquez, but got tired of teaching him, never ever got tired of Borges, that's all it seems to come down to. I enjoy them both, but also got hooked on JLB immediately, yes.

― dow, Saturday, March 19, 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

That could be an effect of Marquez being shoved in people's faces at the time to provoke a comparison between two of the most famous Latin American authors.

just bought amy hempel's collection, reasons to live, after reading her paris review interview. anyone read it?

the latest edition of Flashback! the Richard Morton jack edited British psych/prog/jazz/whatever book size magazine. Just read about Mushroom who I'm listening to now and before that Catapilla who I need to listen to again.
Also got Human Beast and Tamam Shud in this issue which I read yesterday and Koobas and Paternoster who I've yet to read.

THink it's about as good as usual and has me wanting to pick up several artists music.
Has me wondering if I should read that book on Psychedelia by Rob Chapman, which gets slagged off majorly in here, for myself to form an opinion about how naff it is (or not) since some other people seem to think it was ok. BUt since it is a pretty thick tome and some of those other critics aren't people I put much stock in I dunno.

After this I have several things potentially lined up, the book on Ponzi and his scheme ios beside the bed as is Julian Cope's 131 which I've seen mixed reviews for.

Bathroom book is currently the Peter Ackroyd biography of London which I've been meaning to read since it came out and I read reviews of it. Pretty interesting so far, think I just started into early middle ages.

& book for transport is the Andrew loog Oldham Stoned2 which is actually more of an oral history with several people's accounts quoted from interview rather than integrated into a straighter narrative. It's been years since I read the first Stoned so I can't remember if that was done in the same way

Stevo, on the Rolling Jazz thread, I posted a link to and excerpt of Richard Morton Jack's ancient interview with roving free jazz trumpet player Ric Colbeck.
Back to Iris Murdoch's The Red and the Green: as I said, it passed the Random Read Test, for whatever that's worth, but James Morrison doesn't like her, which makes me wonder. Anybody else read it? Any others worth a search?

Starting Don Quixote as of this second. :)

Tbh, ive only read 4 or 5 murdochs, and she wrote a LOT

Starting Don Quixote as of this second. :)

― tangenttangent, Sunday, March 20, 2016 3:15 PM (6 hours ago)

Yeaaaaaaaah. Hope you enjoy it.

I've been depressed and experimenting with tumblr, so I haven't really been posting much, but I've started Sarah Schulman's riff on "Cousin Bette," "Another Country," and midcentury bigotry, "The Cosmopolitans," as well as Dodie Bellamy's essays in "When the Sick Rule the World" (a few essays in, it seems more focused than "Pink Steam," the only other book of hers I've read), and Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis/Lilith's Brood trilogy with a group of friends (currently starting on "Dawn"). Out of what I've read since posting here last, I've probably been most affected by Mary Gaitskill's "Because They Wanted To" (which I picked up in part because of the discussion here), Schulman's "Stagestruck" (passages from which have been circulating on trans twitter lately because of their relevance to the obstacles trans writers currently face, it's one of the most incisive texts I've read on mainstream representations of the AIDS crisis), Jamie Berrout's formally raw but furious "Incomplete Short Stories and Essays," Ta-nahesi Coates's "Between the World and Me," and Patricia Highsmith's "The Price of Salt."

*Ta-Nahesi, I mean

*Ta-nehisi, rather!

*Ta-Nehisi, even!

Speaking of Sarah Schulman, this Hugh Ryan essay gives a useful overview of her work: https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/my-year-of-sarah-schulman

I finished the Banville, thought it was very good. I 100% see where Alfred's parody of orotund expression comes from, but I cut him a lot of slack because 1. It's different when Britishers do it, 2. It felt like an appropriate style for the character, & 3. There were enough significant variations within the style to hold my interest. -- I wasn't really holding the narrator's feet to the fire, but a judicious application of the 'hermeneutics of suspicion' turned up a few points, particularly towards the beginning of the book, where heightened eloquence seemed to be holding at bay a reality he was not yet prepared to face. (!!!! MINOR SPOILER ALERT !!!! -- The defence mechanism breaks down rather pathetically in Part II, leaving one very short paragraph addressed to the dead wife: "You cunt, you fucking cunt, how could you leave me here alone like this" etc etc -- I'm paraphrasing)

lol everytime I type "Banville", I have to doublecheck to make sure I don't mean "Bancroft" #britishppl

Banville isn't British

... So he isn't. Not sure how I got that wrong, given that the one I read was actually set *in* Ireland!

finished the butor novel (passing time): palpable sense of the grimy malevolence of the local environs with a heavy emphasis on the topology of the town it's set in, & the plot (or what there was of one) centred on a pseudonymously published green penguin which may (or may not) have been based on a local crime (that may or may not have really been a crime) and the consequences of the author's (perhaps) unintentional exposure by the (unreliable) narrator. fractured time narrative meant my perception of the characters' motivations/actions kept being altered as missing information was incrementally built-up... no real resolution at the end (which may have been the point?)

now starting on a novel from the mid-sixties by one r.c. kenedy annabel fast... seems it's his only published work except for a couple of monographs on (then) contemporary artists.

Picked up the novel that The Leftovers tv series is based on.

& Homicide by the Wire creator but may already have it. Only €1 though as was the above.

Also got Jim Goad's Redneck Manifesto which might be interesting. Answer Me was interesting.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51XGNLtS3BL._SX319_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

He's a Belgian psychoanalyst and the book is at its best when dealing in that area and his thoughts on how psychiatry's 'illness model' lets everyone off the hook are enlightening. It can be a bit 'society is in the gutter' at points but it's definitely worth a read.

tangenttangent, who's the translator of yer Don Quixote? I wanna read that too.

I know you're not asking me, but my version is the Penguin Classics edition by John Rutherford. No idea if it's well-rated or not, but it's the only version I've read and I loved the book, so it obviously works on some levels.

edith grossman translation seems to be quite well-rated

All reports welcome, thanks!

Just about done with The War in the Air, H.G. Wells. His propagandistic agenda in this book stands out a mile. It is not quite pacifist, but clearly he wants to scare the bejabbers out of his reader concerning the arms race that was taking place in 1907 (mostly naval, building the dreadnoughts) by projecting the same arms race upon an air war, at a time when powered flight was still far too crude to constitute an effective weapon.

In order to create a sufficiently popular potboiler, Wells builds his story around the adventures of a feckless Cockney lad, who nevertheless shows the necessary British pluck and luck when called upon to fight. But because that gave Wells rather too narrow a canvas on which to paint his picture of the coming apocalypse, he frequently halts the action to expatiate on how air war will lead to the destruction and collapse of civilization - if steps are not taken to create a World Government run by practical-minded (but idealistic!) technocrats. This gives the book a weird duality between his need to tell a ripping tale of derring-do and his powerful urge toward straight up pamphleteering.

It is a curious and illuminating artifact from a particular historical moment, which makes it quite interesting to read, but considered as literature it is puny stuff.