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

All Lewis really wants you to walk away with is the unshakable belief that the global financial system is run entirely by thieves and charlatans. He succeeds in this.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Tuesday, 29 March 2016 17:22 (1 hour ago) Permalink

Huh, this wasn't really my impression. I got a sense more of genuine ignorance at complexity of the housing loan contracts, plus the fucked up incentives of the loan rating agencies (as well as the incentive to remain ignorant of what was in the loans in the first place), than individual malice. Which I liked because thinking of Finance as just a bunch of villains makes it hard to think about how to reform it. Shame that he left he whole agency problem of investment/shadow banking to like the last page of the afterword.

List with brief comments, some intriguing, others not(but dammit why can't I remember to get The Art of Memory?):

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/t-magazine/entertainment/my-10-favorite-books-simon-critchley.html?WT.mc_id=D-NYT-MKTG-MOD-30555-03-29-HD&WT.mc_ev=click&WT.mc_c=

Michael Bloch - Closet Queens
Will Cuppy - The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody

Jean Rhys - After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie. There is no heartbreak or disappointment - Rhys' amin characters get just what they expect out of people which is exactly zilch. Nada. Certainly worse. And its a world you are happy to swim in because the writing is so good. In some ways Wide Sargasso Sea might be her only bad book - although I should revisit - it made not that much of an impression. Working back from Good Morning, Midnight is really working, even if I had to start it over again I'd do so from the beginning. Looking forward to two more books of short stories and Quartet later this year.

Tanizaki - In Praise of Shadows. At first its an innocent looking short essay on Japanese aesthetics. There is a shadow of nationalism running through it, a longing for what was and can never be again.

Rhys's Tigers are Better-looking is extraordinary, I think, and Sleep it Off, Lady is slighter but still haunting at times in the way of increasingly skeletal late writing.

Excellent.

When you've exhausted Rhys's own books, it's quite interesting to read her one (that I know of) translation, Francis Carco's 'Perversity': it's nowhere near as good as her own stuff, but you can see why it appealed to her.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/95/1f/30/951f30e03eb93fa82ec8e35cf93428dc.jpg

Rhys's collected letters, edited by Diana Athill, are worth looking at, but maybe not read in full, since they basically boil down to "O poor me, I canot cope, I need money, i can't do anything for myself, o alack alas" and that wears you out after a couple of hundred pages. Athill writes movingly and entertainingly about Rhys in 'Stet'--she was her editor and frequent helper for quite some time.

Well I am looking at reading a vol of Van Gogh's letters later in the year so that might be ok.

Ha! Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo? They're wonderful.

Yeah.

Pat Barker - Life Class
Gary Donaldson - Truman Defeats Dewey
Byron - Selected Letters

... but which will take it upon themselves to start the WAYR thread of the new season?

Here.

think there's a katherine mansfield story based on her stay in war-torn paris and her relationship with carco... i need to reread her stories, it's been a long time.

It's 'An Indiscreet Journey': https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/mansfield/katherine/something/chapter14.html -- Didn't know that it was based on her and Carco!

Really enjoyed Mieville's new novella while I sat in the rare sun at the pub today. Don't know hat folks opinions are of him, but it was some of his best writing.

Spring and All 2k16 / what are you reading now?