It's Fall, and the Autumn of the year, and the store of fruit supplants the rose - so what windfall words have you been reading?

finished two more of a.m. homes's this weekend: the end of alice and music for torching. alice was okay: it felt like the narrator was kind of a received idea, and the other protagonist's life was really the interesting part. - so only hearing her voice through his act of ventriloquism was a little frustrating.

music for torching was pretty great though. the slightly sardonic third-person works really well for her - tonally it's the closest to the donuts one i guess? - & the way the novel works on the level of plot is great, i think, this total heaping on of events, any three or four of which would suffice to create a 'normal' plot for the suburban-marriage-in-breakdown novel

have been stuck on in a country of mothers for a while. probably three in a row was unnecessary.

oh, and an ed mcbain: the ten men. it's, you know, an early ed mcbain. you learn, again, that meyer meyer has the name he does because his father was a joking man.

Gamaliel made me look up 'Guthlac Roll' on Google Images, and I've now wasted a lot of time looking at these freaky pictures.

Recently read:

William Wharton: A Midnight Clear -- rather excellent WW2 novel which took me a while to get into because of the chirpy, youthful, Holden Caulfieldish narrator (this is based on very dim memories of reading 'Catcher in the Rye')

Yukio Mishima: Death in Midsummer -- short story collection

still working on 'troubles'. i love this dude's writing:

Although he was sure he had never actually proposed to Angela during the few days of their acquaintance, it was beyond doubt that they were engaged: a certainty fostered by the fact that from the very beginning she had signed her letters Your loving fiance, Angela. This had surprised him at first. But, with the odour of death drifting into the dug-out in which he scratched out his replies by the light of the candle, it would have been trivial and discourteous beyond words to split hairs about such purely social distinctions.

“Hm… actually one of our guests wrote a sort of poem, you know, about how the place probably used to look in the old days. Lovely bit of work. Angela embroidered some of it for me on a cushion. I’ll show it to you later on. I think you’ll appreciate it.”

“I’m sure I shall,” agreed the Major.

The dog barked, doubtfully.

xp to thomp:

i really enjoyed music for torching as well - i love that kind of surreal suburban weirdness. in a country of mothers is really... odd. it goes in weird directions. but i read it right after reading the mistress' daughter, which is homes' real life story of dealing with her adoption.

i started memoirs of an anti-semite

Yukio Mishima: Death in Midsummer -- short story collection

You're reading Patriotism and going 'wtf' right? ;-)

Started on Proust now

Tintin In The New World

Not really a full meal. Okay, though.

oh: "by Frederic Tuten".

Am also reading the Martin Beck series out of order this year. Also reading the Rebus series in order, just finished the first Fletch book, and rinsing with selections from Literary Journalism anthology.

You're reading Patriotism and going 'wtf' right? ;-)

Yes, very much so! Bloody hell!

Took the plunge...

Herta Muller: The Land of Green Plums

eric ambler's dirty story, which i enjoyed, but this enjoyment was rather soiled by two things: i. realising it was the middle term of a never-finished trilogy; ii. the fact that one of the mining organisations in it was called UMAD, which i just couldn't stop thinking lol u mad all through

a book of lenny bruce routines, which was funnier than i expected. now starting his autobiography.

william gass's on being blue, which is good, but gass does spend a lot of time going "look at me! me! i'm clever!": i had a dream last night where people were arguing about some of the stuff in this book, actually; in said dream someone claimed the passage of stone-sucking in molloy was "one of the most erotic in all literature"

aaaand i couldn't bring myself to try and read anything sensible so i'm reading a fantasy novel called (rather pretentiously imo) the blade itself

Speaking of not reading sensibly, I have just about finished reading every bit of ephemeral flotsam by Anthony Burgess, as collected in But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?, 589 pp of writing he did for newspapers and periodicals, mostly book reviews.

Reading so many of his opinions at one go, one does uncover what were his hobby-horses. For a while, every piece got sidetracked into phonemes and the need for educated people to know linguistic notation.

Yesterday I started John Reed's Insurgent Mexico, wherein he visits Pancho Villa's army as a war correspndent. Despite being clearly sympathetic to the peasant uprising, he is merciless at describing the participants, who come off as ignorant, impulsive, venal and brutal. Their opponents come off even worse.

I have a shameful weakness for collections of occasional writing. That one's in my future -- I'm resigned to it.

i saw a copy hanging around the other day. i kind of got annoyed bcz someone (maybe the author of gpb) had done a book called something like 'they marry brunettes, though' which seemed much the better riff on the famous title

Yeah, Anita Loos wrote 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' and 'But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes'

I read Ambler's 'Dirty Story' recently, too. Cover had a close-up of a big fat hairy chest/bulging stomach, which is probably why it had languished so long in the cheap box at the 2nd-hand shop. Enjoyed the book, though.

In this book on Flemish painting there's a critic mentioned called Ludwig Baldass.

Been a while, let's see what I can remember.

Lots of books on Jesuits for a thing I wrote ages ago and am trying to polish up: most wtf was finding Joseph Hocking, popular anti-Catholic novelist of the 19th/early 20th. His Scarlet Woman certainly persuaded me Methodism was the future.

More Hume, some Hobbes, and Quentin Skinner's book on Hobbes and Rhetoric. Felt pleasantly perverse to read a solid academic book for kicks. First time I've done so, I think, since I was sort of in that world. Stuff just flies by when you don't really have to worry about it, make notes, follow his sources etc.

Misha Glenny's McMafia. The upper true crime (I'm sort of a sucker for this), a bit of criminal sociology. Enjoyable, interesting, feels trustworthy though it (understandably) weakens the further it gets from Eastern Europe/Central Asia.

I'm struggling a bit with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I feel as if there isn't enough detail to hook me and make it come alive. I like the character and appreciate that he's having struggles, but it's as if they're on bluescreens rather than in real places and against real people.

How far into it are you? Because to me big sections of that book live from feeling unreal, there's a lot of symbolism and Kafka-type alienation to Ellison's approach. But it gets closer to realism as it moves along.

About a quarter of the way, maybe - he's delivering his letters of introduction around New York at the moment. The Kafka comparison hadn't occurred to me, but is pretty accurate.

Now on page 326. Less than 300 to go.

Time for another poetry break. Ernest Hilbert, Sixty Sonnets.

Irene Nemirovsky: The Dogs and the Wolves -- really good -- troubled Jewish family in the Ukraine and Paris circa WW1

Elizabeth Jolley: An Innocent Gentleman -- quite good -- troubled English family semi menage-a-trois shenanigans in WW2

Hugo Claus: Desire -- very good so far -- two Belgian gamblers on a Las Vegas spree

lovin it all, feelin goth

Sheridan Le Fanu- In a Glass Darkly
some P. Shelley collection
the Nunnally trans. of H.C. Andersen

Finishing Way by Swann's and it is AWESOMES: like a cross between Ruskin and Denton Welch, and I am very glad I saw Akermann's Proust film, it really gets the that will to possess and how pathetic a character like Swann comes across.

Also some unexpected funnies in this. Weirldy enough I am glad I got to see a couple of episodes of Jeeves and Wooster while I was ill last week, that got me into a mindset for this...

Will be moving on to the next part.

Pfaff's, yes Pfaff's, biography of MR James - focuses more on James the scholar than Michael Cox's biography, which is sort of the way I wanted to go.

Eton and Kings by MR James.

James' ghost stories are some of my favourite writing, but I'm not much of a reader of biographies :(

I'm pretty much in the same boat, and it's rather dry. But he's long been one of my favourite writers and so I felt it was time I paid my dues.

almost finished with The Things They Carried by tim o'brien. usually try to avoid war-centred stories, as they make me feel weirdly squeamish, but this one was great - very simple in terms of style and language, but really very moving.

just beginning
Yonder by siri hustvedt
Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill

Oh, that name's familiar - I think I have a Vietnam book by him in a box somewhere. He's good then?

v v good. the only other novel of his i've read is July, July, which i don't really remember too well, except that it was weird, something about a school reunion, and i really enjoyed it.

Yeah, Tim O'Brien's (usually) excellent: start with 'The Things They Carried', 'July, July' or 'If I Die in a Combat Zone...'

Reading William Hazlitt's 'Liber Amoris', interspersed with the huge new 2-vol Library of America 'American Fantastic Tales' -- both excellent in VERY different ways

still working on memoirs of an anti-semite (lol slow) but i like it very much
last night i started joyce carol oates - because it is bitter.... it seems good. do people like her? it seems like she writes so so much.

Been reading Dhalgren in piecemeal, just started (as in 30 pages in) Forbidden Colours by Yukio Mishima, which will be the first anything I've read by him. These might be some of the last few novels I read for a while before I start burying my head in technical junk about electronics.

Who is Joyce Carol Oates? I was eyeballing something or another by her at the used book store a couple days ago because the name rang a bell but just couldn't pinpoint it. (If she's somebody totally obvious I wouldn't be one to know, i am a rub3)

she's notorious for being so prolific. pretty hit and miss from what i hear, but i've only read a few of her novels. We Were The Mulvaneys is good if like family drama and tragedy, but she uses way too many explanation points in the narration.

what is an explanation point?

i have been vaguely busy, so not reading much. i read about the first third of 'diary of a nobody' this morning, though.

oh i'm a retard - ~exclamation~ point is what i meant

Pagoda, Skull & Samurai, Koda Rohan

i read the other two-thirds of 'diary of a nobody'. it's kind of funny. the funniest moments are when people other than the narrator are being ludicrous. i was surprised how many times it had been adapted to film: seems a bit beside the point somehow.

And The Best of Bijou Funnies and The Apex Treasury of Underground Comics, in one volume. Which were okay, although I don't understand why anyone would ever find the fabulous furry freak brothers funny, I guess.

Straw Dogs - John Gray.

Immensely amusing. Vigorously and persistently pessimistic, plenty of lolz per page - 'In the struggle for life, a taste for truth is a luxury - or else a disability', 'We look at the world through eyes of ancient mud' 'Without this absurd Tertullian-like faith, the Enlightenment is a gospel of despair'.

I'm immensely sympathetic to his point of view, although I imagine like most people I depart from him here and there - he's rather cavalier in his use of science for instance, and I generally favour the pursuit of knowledge embodied in the Enlightenment as a worthwhile endeavour, for which I'm willing to accept the implicit eschatology. I mean, you could sort of sum up his argument, it's all shit, we're a murrain on the universe, we're all going to hell in a handcart and everything's f'ing pointless, it's self-deceiving and vain to think in any other way, and all programmes of self-improvement are corrupted from the beginning by their very aim. And I agree, I do, but, y'know, steady the buffs, have a mug of cocoa, John, there, there.

Anyway it's all extremely stimulating, dashing and witty - like a swashbuckling sailor defending a philosophy of Ballardian apocalypse against hordes of all-comers. Very readable as well.

finished dave eggers' zeitoun, starting that new dan chaon novel and re-reading some madeleine l'engle books for a book club.

the JCO book is very good and i read like 100 pages on saturday...then i became scared of what would happen and didn't want to read any further. this never happens to me! it's just a book! i'll finish it in the next couple days though, probably

Let's see if this works

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Hjalmar Soderbergh - Doctor Glas
Stefan Zweig - Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman
Sandor Marai - Esther's Inheritance

I found "Straw Dogs" utterly unbearable and cast it aside with disgust no more than a couple of dozen pages in. I'll admit I'm not particularly sympathetic to Gray's beliefs but I honestly think that had very little to do with it. I'm happy to read a well-constructed polemic that challenges my thinking, but Gray has no idea how to construct a logical argument. There were obvious and infuriating non-sequiturs on every page. If I can find my copy I may come back to illustrate.

Weirdly failing to learn from my mistake I was later seduced by a combination of good reviews and impulse to buy "Black Mass", which I read even less of before I decided it wasn't for me.

Picked up Jenny Uglow's new biographical-historical thing on Charles II since it was lying around an office I was in. Wasn't intending to read it especially, but started and finding it enjoyable - rolls along, nothing troubling. She's good at popular history/biography: overcomes some ascetic-masochist part of me that believes if I want to know about the past, I should read a) primary sources and b) impenetrable histories that don't explain who anyone is and are full of comparative grain harvest charts. It also fits with my current long-18th-century reading jag.

Starting Thomas Ligotti's Teatro Grottesco.

Gamaliel OTM about John Gray imo: I thought Straw Dogs was a hoot & that his lunatic, absolute gloom was great fun. I mean as say a history of ideas book, it's overcompressed, elliptical, not too hard to pick apart; but as an essay in aphoristic pessimism, it's a cracker. Suspect that finding his beliefs sympathetic in the first place does help.

Black Mass I thought was a lot shakier: quite bitty, dull when dealing with contemporary politics, and iffy on pre-Enlightment apocalyptic trads. But he's someone I'm glad is in the reason/religion arguments: has some style and is willing to be the donnish jerk who just keeps saying 'no, religion's a bit more complicated than that', 'no, the Enightenment's a bit more complicated than that'.

1066: The Year of the Conquest, David Howarth. I've been reading this on successive Mondays when I have some dead time on my school bus. Just finished it.

Excellent treatment of the subject. He presented it in very human and understandable terms. I liked, too, that the author discussed his sources and his methods in very matter-of-fact, practical terms, letting you in on how he sifted and sorted the contradictions between or within them, or why he rejected some parts of the narrative and kept others.

Straw Dogs sounds like something I might find interesting. It seems like a much shorter and bleaker version of A Secular Age by Charles Taylor, which I found pretty interesting. I guess for anyone who's not convinced by Gray's assertion that secular humanism is basically a continuation of Christianity by other means, Taylor does a lot of the historical heavy-lifting to substantiate the claim. Although whereas that analysis leads Taylor to a defense of religion against humanism and the Nietzchean anti-humanist alternative, it seems to lead Gray to a modern revival of animism and Taoism via the Gaia hypothesis.