A Model TrILBY; or, What Are You Reading Now, Winter 2016/17

There was a version of the Collected Stories which led with an introduction by Angus Wilson. One with a green, kind of boring cover. Current version in the US with the nice painting lists the Angus Wilson intro in the TOC but it has in fact gone missing.

Mine has an Angus Wilson introduction (boring cover but its navy blue). Were you looking for it? I'm sure I could take some photos and upload it somewhere, its only a few pages long.

Thanks, but I read it recently in a library copy so no need right now. Not sure exactly why its absence irks me. Maybe I am missing the brick and mortar bookstore where I bought his Anglo-Saxon Attitudes.

Also just remembering that somewhere I have the intro she wrote herself to Ivy Gripped the Steps and Other Stories.

I'm reading the navy blue doorstop edition with Angus Wilson's intro, but you're not missing much without that. Makes a few good points I guess but he's very hats-off to what he beholds as her robust country heiress grace, Conservative but fair-minded (also claims she's better than Woolf etc). But she seems to be full of mischief from the get-go, initially in a way maybe fairly familiar to yer more sophisticated sort of magazine readers, but increasingly pushing against and around gender norms, as female characters, especially (but not only) test power factors and divine secret codicils in their heritage---along with the money and status, always useful, and you can't get away from any of the expectations and possibilities; even if you don't have much yourself, you're downwind of Someone who does. Also, you might be a good little wife secretly lost, re-entering the clutches of the Helper (as she says her friends on the Continent call her), for instance.
Wonder what Woolf, Mansfield, Jane Bowles thought of her? Wonder what DH Lawrence thought, for that matter---prob mixed emotions: here's a "secret" sister, but an suavely uppity woman too.

So far the stories are still pretty short, brief encounters, hit and run. See you soon.

Michael Moorcock: My Experiences in the Third World War And Other Stories -- only a few in, but the first four stories, linked under the book's title, about a Russian spy in the lead-up to and early days of a WW3, are very nice and significantly less pulpy than a lot of the Moorcock I've read.

I like his description in the intro of how his huge volume of 1960s/70s books were "written quickly, but not cynically" (ie Elric in 9 days, apparently)

Finished The Count of Montecristo two days ago. It's hard to imagine that I'll be reading a better book this year.

Now I'm halfway Thomas Olde Heuvelt's HEX, a silly Dutch horror novel about a small village and its very own 300-year old witch.

Blue Boy by Jean Giono; fictionalised autobiog, swelling dripping fecund nature-humans with the real world clearly there but dreamily unacknowledged. Very Giono, in other words. I like it.

Michael Moorcock: My Experiences in the Third World War And Other Stories

is this the new Gollancz collection? (It looks like there was a previous collection w the same title)

God, I read Count of Monte Cristo last summer, Robin Buss translation -- it really is the best thing

Cervantes - Don Quixote. Now onto Part 2, see you next month :-)

did you dudes reading the count of monte cristo do abridged editions or did you go the whole hog?

Philip S. Foner - History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. 1: From Colonial Times to the Founding of the American Federation of Labor

sweet

Sciatica - I read the Robin Buss Penguin translation, which is unabridged and really easy to read, if not to hold.

Not sure how an abridged version could work - even at the length it is, there's very little filler. Even the wet romantic leads get some really good bits, and the off-topic chapters about Italian bandits fun - it never drags. There's no Tolstoy-style "...and now I'm going to do a short essay about love/betrayal/tractors before we get back to the story. It's ALL plot and ridiculousness and jaw-dropping twists. Just got 1200 pages.

God I should proofread before I post but you get the idea.

i should learn to read period since i see you mentioned the edition in your original post

also a little googling shows the abridgements to be pretty severe -- looks like maybe 400 pages total in an old penguin paperback

damn you for getting me excited about another long-ass old-ass book

Michael Moorcock: My Experiences in the Third World War And Other Stories

is this the new Gollancz collection? (It looks like there was a previous collection w the same title)

― Οὖτις, Saturday, 14 January 2017 2:44 AM (seven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes, part of the supposedly definitive huge new moorcock collection they have been doing for the last couple of years. I also got Von Bek and another collection, The Brothel in Rosenstrasse

Spots

It's amazing, be excited! I managed it in 6 weeks, as a very slow reader, which is... not too bad? The only challenge is the length, it's super easy to read. NB Buss version is the way to go - I read a few chapters alongside the original uncredited version, which is beautiful but misses the jokes and the fruitiness.

Spots = autocorrect for xpost

ah yeah I don't bother with a lot of Gollancz stuff. Von Bek books are ok, nothing special. Haven't read the Brothel in Rosenstrasse.

xp

I got the Von Bek because it had an interesting-sounding mitteleuropa thing going on; not sure how that will square with all the Eternal Champion! stuff

Passably imo

Basically everything Chuck said re: Monte Cristo. You should definitely read an unabridged version.

You might want to make a list of the characters and their relationships, especially if you take more than a few weeks to get through the book. Wikipedia has a nice diagram, but it contains massive spoilers.

I finished the novel in about 2 weeks, but that included several days of getting up at six to get another 50 pages in before breakfast. I feel bad for those poor newspaper readers who had to wait days or even weeks for the next installment.

I love that TWO of the arrows on that diagram are "poisons (but doesn't kill)".

I just finished The Ballad of Peckham Rye, not sure what to make of it.

Ballad of Peckham Rye has not aged well. The social norms it assumes have changed too drastically.

The Eye Listens by Paul Claudel, a collection of essays on art. His "Introduction to Dutch Painting" is lovely.

Reading He Died With His Eyes Open by Derek Raymond. I feel like I know Cook/Raymond because of various Iain Sinclair books and conversations, but this is the first thing I've actually read. It's great - fizzingly brutal, British noir, full of great dialogue and aphorisms (the 'Raymond' is a deliberate nod) and quite clearly a forerunner to the likes of David Peace and Gordon Burn.

Those derek raymonds are amazing, and get more brutal as the series goes on

I've heard Dora Suarez is kind of unreadable in its brutality. That true?

Pretty much. It is excellent writing but a truly horrible book.

Wikipedia: To Cook’s delight, the ensuing novel caused Dan Franklin, the publisher of its three predecessors, to vomit over his desk.

Reading film related stuff. Shusako Endo's Silence, William Carlos Williams' Paterson. And Roberto Bolaño's Nazi Literature in the Americas, which isn't really film related, though I'm finally reading Bolaño because he got compared to Pablo Larrain. Everything's good.

judging by James Wood's comments and quotes here, Helen Gardner's books can be pretty strenuous, incl. for her, but worth it. Would esp. like to check what he says is her best (of the fiction, anyway): The Spare Room, an autobiographical novel about taking care of a dying friend, which turns out to be even more emotionally complex than expected. Anybody read her?
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/12/helen-garners-savage-self-scrutiny

Helen Garner, that is.

Her non-fiction is especially good--she's a big deal here in Australia. Another very good one of hers is Joe Cinque's Consolation, a true crime story about a group of friends/housemates who decided to murder one of their number with poison.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/26/Book_joe_cinques_consolation.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Cinque's_Consolation
It was just made into a poorly received film.

Her fiction is mostly from the 1970s/80s, and there is some good stuff there too. With that I'd start with 'The Children's Bach' or the two novellas 'Honour & Other People's Children'.
https://cdn.penguin.com.au/covers/original/9780143180043.jpg
https://cdn.penguin.com.au/covers/1440/9780143180050.jpg

shit, sorry for huge cover images

The bigger the cover image the better. Was in the Old Country Store side of a Cracker Barrel yesterday, unready for the LP versions of album covers familiar on CDs. wau

Thanks for Garner tips too, don't think Wood mentioned those.

Halfway through "The Master And The Margarita"; whats strikes me most is how much it's a novel about the elites, with ordinary workers (tram drivers, cabbies, maids) getting a few lines at most and clearly inhabiting a different universe. Not that I was naive about the Soviet Union's pretenses of a classless society, but it is striking how much this book would be seen as a critique of the bourgeoisie if it had been written in the wets.

Started Go Set a Watchman (it was a gift), I feel like I'm being amiably hectored by the Mark Twain character from that star trek episode.

"Blue Boy" is fantastic. Whenever I start a Giono I seem to think it's not as good as other Gionos I've read, and by the time I've finished it I think it's the best Giono I've read.

Now I'm reading "The Evenings" by Gerard Reve, (just) post-war Amsterdam business in a handsome new Pushkin Press edition whose cover is a clear nod to my beloved Amsterdam School architecture:

http://www.pushkinpress.com/wp-content/uploads/Evenings-.jpg

That's lovely - who drew it? (Got a bit of a Darwyn Cooke vibe about it, tho unlikely to be his work)

Oh, and reading The Jinx by Theophile Gautier

I'm not sure (and I've left the dust jacket at home for safe keeping) - will check later.

Would like to hear what you think Tim. It's odd to see this book finally getting an English release after all these years. I doubt there are many people over 40 in Holland who haven't read it, it's top ten canon stuff.

i picked that up in foyles yesterday cos of the beautiful cover.

I couldn't really hack Don Quixote tbh. I've started reading Knausgard's, "My Struggle Vol.1" instead and I'm enjoying it. It's like the best boring book I've ever read. Kind of amazing how he's able to remember such inconsequential childhood details so vividly.

What's up with that title though

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Quixote

I finished the 'official' portion of The Man Without Qualities and have decided against plunging onward into the posthumous papers atm. I toyed with the idea of Reading a quick Penelope Fitzgerald, either Blue Flower or else Gate of Angels, but I am in need of a non-fiction break and therefore picked up The Thirty Years War, C.V. Wedgewood last night.