Words! Words! Words!: Autumn 2012 'What do you read, my lord?' thread

i have trouble with nabokov. i like the early books okay because they are easier to read. the later ones i can never finish. i've tried to read lolita a bunch of times. he reads so strange to me. his sentences. i don't think my brain works that way. i have problems with math.

Is it this quote that we're talking about?

“Yes,” she said. “Nabokov was five years off. What most men like is not the moment that precedes puberty, but the one immediately after. Anyway, he wasn’t a very good writer…”

I too had never been able to bear that mediocre and mannered pseudo-poet, that clumsy imitator of Joyce, who had never been lucky enough to posses the energy that sometimes enabled the insane Irishman to rise above his ponderous prose.

A collapsed pastry, that was what Nabokov’s style had always made me think of.

Yeah, that is weak.

I don't much like Nabokov but there's a story "Signs and Symbols" that I like. It compresses an amazing amount of feeling into just a few pages.

is his prose as bad in the french

His takedown of Larry Clark in same book is hilarious in its insistence, I'll admit. It's not a Bad Book, I think I was just too caught up in the plotting the first time around

Ooh scott I'm sad you don't like late Nabokov, his prose reads great to me, every sentence is like the easiest and most pleasing cryptic crossword clue (not for everybody I'm sure)

i wld def place palmer eldritch in the v upper tier of dick novs, and think of it as the first in a VERY loose trilogy w/ ubik and scanner darkly of drug PANIC bks - that vertiginous acid phear that 'reality' can never be recovered because nothing ever was, anyway. palmer eldritch is one of the funniest dick novs, and one of the scariest, and again, the two bleed into one, continually; dick is such a master of escalating hysteria; laughter in the dark, and in the light.

i have been reading The End by Ian Kershaw, a history of the final eight months or so of Nazi Germany and an attempt to understand why the germans refused to surrender well past the point that the second world war was lost to them. it's not the kind of thing i wld normally read for pleasure (my dad passed it on to me), and at times i've longed for a slightly more subjective and culturalist way of telling; however kershaw's restrained prose style and typical academic caution actually makes the slow careful account of atrocity and endgames even more revolting and disturbing.

That Wasserman novel sounds right up my alley...

I read one of the best novels I've ever encountered this summer: SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING (1958) by Alan Sillitoe. Check that is out. Seriously.

ish*

Read Nabokov's The Defense in high school, feeling like I finally caught all the worldly brainwaves broadcast from a first-rate example of Modern Lit. It's the story of a very sheltered Russian chess prodigy, gliding gently down the drain. I think I associated it with late 50s/early 60s Alfred Hitchcock, incl the weekly anthology series he hosted--when it was still 20-something shrewd minutes per episode; The Defense was also concise. Don't know how it would seem now. And I liked another late shortie, Transparent Things.

I moved on from P.K. Dick to reading Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Like night and day. From thin cartoon characters created only to illustrate with abstract ideas to a novel where observing character is the entirety and every sentence and every detail is crafted in beautiful bas relief.

It's a terrific novel. Thanks for reminding me -- it's been 20 years since I read it. Her last two religio-mystic novels are good too.

bought her latest book of essays and its slow going for me. like reading the bible. or something biblical. i feel like i need to go to college when i read stuff like that. its plainspeak. like plainsong. but really dense for all its plain-ness. i swear i know how to read books. housekeeping one of my favorite novels of all time. i struggled with what came after.

she's some kind of neo-Calvinist, isn't she -- the kind who reveres the density of intelligent 17th century sermons, no?

those nu-calvinists. you gotta watch out for them.

they're trouble.

start another America and burn witches

MOBY DICK (for the first time)

Her last two religio-mystic novels are good too.

You mean Gilead and Home? I loved the former almost despite its religious trappings. The main character was amazing, one of the most generous and generously written I've ever come across, full of sympathy for those around him despite their apparent failings, and constantly trying to do the Right Thing. And although ostensibly he was on the hot line to God to help him do so I could read that just as his way of carefully and considerately thinking over the problem at hand. Home was less overtly religious but also less compelling in terms of character, the two leads much more inward, mired in their own world views, failing to properly connect with others.

I really need to get Housekeeping. I wouldn't touch her essays with a barge pole.

i saw her give a talk on christology that i didn't understand a single word of

well yeah

Still on the Henry James kick (if you can call it a kick, I suppose).

What Maisie Knew - Totally into James' playing with the extent of which adults behave in an adult way, the way they let their guard down (or not) around a child but the thread was lost for me at some point, and again the whole losing of innonence by the gaining of knoowledge (or its concealement).

Like the themes a lot but lost much of the minutiae of plot - need to return to this at some point.

The Aspern Papers - applying the quest for a knowledge to a academicky literary type quest masquarding as unfulfilled relations.

The inevitable break from the above:

Bolano - Antwerp - really loved this -- at a sentence level I liked the formulations he came up in snatches that didn't add up to anything much of a narrative! Loved the construction of utter desolation and emptyness of town, places, people, some of whom have skeletal encounters. The hunchbck annoyed me but I'm reading this post-David Lynch and he wrote this pre-Twin Peaks so I guess that's ok.

I think this was all ok in the end because it was short yet unreleting for all of its short duration.

Haldor Laxness - Under the Glacier. This is an amazing random find at my library. Wonder if the writer of "The Wicker Man" read this (book is from '68 and the film is from '76). V witty, interestingly written as partly a play, then switches to reportage (in a confused third to first person).

(sorry film is from '73)

I used to own Laxness' Independent People for years but never got aroiund to reading past the first couple of chapters. I still want to get back to it someday!

am halfway through swann's way (or a 1/12th of the way through in search of lost time). this fucking guy.

Great, huh..

I happened to also have read Proust's Pleasures and Regrets and many of his own formulations: Habit, the ideas around unfulfilled desires -- and how fulfilling them is the worst things that could happen to you -- but then again not so much here, in these skecthes, around memory. I guess that was yet to come. Kinda quite frightening how all those ideas were there (as well as the notion that life was basically a grim joke) by the time he was 25.

Apparently Under the Glacier is a one-off for Laxness, unlike any of his books.

Not doing enough justice to the quality of Aspen Papers above but I see a thematic commonality w/Proust. That, and a love for Venice.

I finished Housekeeping. Amazing book! Mainly it speaks about absence and transcience in a strange otherworldy tone that I've never seen matched elsewhere.

I can't say I always agreed with the many ex cathedra statements about how the world works, but the book carries such conviction and consistency of view that it is hard to get mad about the perfect, unblemished certainty of these pronouncements. While reading this one it was hard to get past the idea that the author must have some insight most of us lack, however strange that insight might be.

I thought the religious aspects of GILEAD were beautiful...

Maurice Dekobra: The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars -- from 1927, spy/adventure romp: if Modesty Blaise had been much posher, written by a Frenchman and invented decades earlier

Also tried to read the new Michael Chabon, but really couldn't get into it. Partly it was the bad editing (the word 'elegaic' used twice in the first 6 pages, the main character's surname sometimes losing its final S), and partly because it seemed as though he was trying really hard to channel The Wire. Will reattempt at some later stage.

Reminds me: I saw a copy of The Sleeping Car Murders by Sebastien Japrisot. Anybody read it, or any of his others?

did anyone read those justin cronin vampire/plague blockbusters? reading that nyt magazine story made me curious.

plus, these really are the books to namedrop these days: Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn

eugenides did it today in the nyt. think chabon did it last week? snd their was the new yorker thing. all the rage!

eugenides also said this today:

What’s the last truly great book you read?

“The Love of a Good Woman,” by Alice Munro. There’s not one story in there that isn’t perfect. Each time I finished one, I just wanted to lie down on the floor and die. My life was complete. Munro’s prose has such a surface propriety that you’re never prepared for the shocking places her stories take you. She pulls off technical feats, too, like changing the point of view in each section of a single story. This is nearly impossible to do while carrying the necessary narrative freight forward, but she makes it look easy. Most readers don’t notice how technically inventive Munro is because her storytelling and characterization overwhelm their attention.

see, people here aren't most readers. we all know how technically inventive she is. do most people who read munro not know that? i think he sells readers of munro short.

did anyone read those justin cronin vampire/plague blockbusters?

I tried the first one. 300 pages of set-up before you get to the real story, set 100 years later, at which point I bailed. Those 300 pages could be summed up as 'US Govt created vampires in a lab, they got out'.

most recent library haul:

heather love - feeling backwards: loss and the politics of queer history
quentin crisp - the naked civil servant
leslie feinberg - stone butch blues

Currently reading Hunter S Thompson's Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail 72 for election season. I'm a geek about US election books, especially 1972, which I've already read about in Nixonland and Timothy Crouse's brilliant The Boys on the Bus, but even I had to skip through the in-depth explanation of how McGovern reached his delegate tally at the Miami DNC. Lots of great stuff in there - especially the portraits of the Democratic candidates - but boy it's long.

Just finished Mother Night, which is my favourite Vonnegut so far.

plus, these really are the books to namedrop these days: Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn

eugenides did it today in the nyt. think chabon did it last week? snd their was the new yorker thing. all the rage!

― scott seward, Tuesday, 9 October 2012 02:57 (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha, i heard these mentioned in real life for the first time the other day. the infection is spreading

i'm reading zadie smith's new one. i think it might be actually quite good.

I take it that's the one about the two female friends, one whose life was saved early on by the other's mother--promising excerpt in the New Yorker: oromising, but eventually just stopped, so I hope it's an excerpt. DL, have you read Mailer's St. George and the Godfather? Pretty deft, even witty; not too long or heavily underscored. Everybody knew what was at stake, even without knowing much at all about Watergate yet.

Munro is my favorite living writer. The last two collections are scattershot though.

I picked up a copy of From Heaven Lake, a Vikram Seth book from the mid-eighties about hitchhiking to Tibet. Outdated, but interesting in a retrospective way. Also, short.

reading Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie, absolutely riveting. the new yorker excerpt left out crucial stuff at the beginning, surprisingly

Just finished Memento Mori by Muriel Spark and have just begun Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess (which has an amazing Bill Sanderson cover illustration). What was nice was that MM ends with reference to The Last Four Things and a short way into ToI, The Last Four Things crops up again.

I used to own Laxness' Independent People for years but never got aroiund to reading past the first couple of chapters. I still want to get back to it someday!

Yes! Independent People is such a great book. Fucking devastating.

Cosmocmics - Calvino. a delight.

Peter Terrin: The Guard -- Dutch writer, novel about two guards in the basement of a super-rich high-rise apartment building which has been suddenly evacuated for reasons unknow; they stay on and go mad. Very Ballard, in a good way

marguerite yourcenar - the abyss

edward said, humanism and democratic criticism
richard rorty, contingency, irony, and solidarity

I just read a review of Laxness' Under the Glacier: that novel sounds amazing!!!

I wouldn't call it amazing, but it's definitely worth reading. I read that one first, then Independent People, and I'd say Under the Glacier was very good but not great whereas Independent People is one of the best books I've ever read.

way too much I think. Or at least try to. Took too many books to London with me so had to leave Billie's Blues behind without reading it. Billie Holiday bio which looked like it should be very interesting.

Read Black Ajax by George McDonald Fraser which I'd taken over on a previous trip and hadn't read. Enjoyable as a lot of the writer's material is, this one was about a black bare knuckle boxer in the early 19th century stranded in the UK. Could be construed as a bit racist, not sure about Fraser's own politics so could just be conveying what people of the time's responses would be.
Read this and the Chris Morris biography Disgusting Bliss while laid up in bed with a swollen knee. So probably could have got some way into the Billie Holiday book.

Did allow me to start the White Goddess which i've been meaning to read for years, even before I ordered it online a couple years back and still haven't got very far with.
& now I've just picked up Dark Star the Jerry Garcia oral history which I had several years back but got nicked in a box that a mentally challenged co-resident of a house i lived in took as I moved out. I'd left the box in the hallway with several others waiting for a taxi that never showed & I later found one box upside down and it looking like there was a gap. Also had 2 signed copies of Bad Seed the Nick Cave bio in among some other stuff I'm still not 100% exactly what. So glad to slowly be replacing the books from it I've missed ever since.
slightly annoying.

both lo and PF are very funny, i think: one of the endearing things about VN is that he isn't above the dopiest forms of humor -- puns, slapstick, silly names. he loved the scene in the kubrick film where humbert is struggling to get the hotel cot open, with three stooges-esque results. i was put off reading PF for years because i expected it to be some dull esoteric thing, but a lot of it is just hilarious.

the good thing about PF is it reminds you that Edmund Wilson had a point about Volodya's versifying.

Also love Pnin. The character and tone fit perfectly, there's a pathos to the Pnin's jokiness, which isn't quite Nabokov's - tho maybe in a refracted way it is, as it's a kind-hearted, earnest desire to fit in and be liked, which contains a strain of well-described quixotic romanticism. One way of looking at that is as a more human version of Nabokov's 'knight's move' narrative structures. There's a sense of tilting at a parallel world windmill, and that being at the centre of the narrator's 'real' world, hence the awkward and humorous estrangement that is consistent across a lot of Nabokov's writing, English and Russian. America, after all, was not V's first place of exile. Tricky bugger, mainly because he enjoys being so tricky. Enjoyable tho. Haven't read Lolita for years. My favourite is probably The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

xp

I must admit I find the dopey humour irritating rather than enjoyable, but that I'm v prepared to admit is a failure in me. It is less persistent in the Russian novels I think, so might be a reasonable way of judging which Nabokov a new reader, or an old unsuccessful reader, might want to go to first.

i actually really love the poem in PF, but i've never been able to decide how seriously we're meant to take it, or whether it's even supposed to be good or not. but there's lots of beautiful lines in there.

it does duplicate the flatness of a translation, I must admit.

Yeah I think the issue is that I wasn't at all prepared for it and not really in the mood for it. The Lolita character is pretty incredible... It's like the realist 12 yr old ever. And some sentences are just pure beautiful.

'Let The Great World Spin' - Colum McCann

Going through transcribing old notebooks - this made me laugh/think of ilx:

(of Rupert of Deutz)

This led him into arguments from which he emerged - successfully as he thought - in what his enemies regarded as a cloud of verbiage issuing from a word-drunk writer multiplying allegorical interpretations of Scripture which were already too numerous, and rashly engaging in dialectical arguments for which he had no competence.

(not sure where this is from or indeed who RoD is. might be Apes and Ape Lore or some history of scholasticism I was reading. )

So, Rupert of Deutz was a viking at rash dialectical arguments?

lolita is my favorite novel. when i read it i read an annotated version they had at my library, i wouldn't say it's necessary obviously but it's obviously a very densely allusive and playful novel and i'm not sure i would have gotten as much out of it without the annotations. the guy did a great job (the annotations themselves are probably 120+ pages) and it also includes some great scholarly criticism by the guy who was something of a nabokov obsessive

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/07/arts/07appel.html?_r=0

seemed like a cool guy

Recently:

Frank - a bio of Frank Sinatra by James Kaplan. I don't read a lot of biographies but often pick up one or two around Christmas. This is decent, throughly researched, generally fair minded and reasonably well written. Long (800 pages only takes us up to the late 50s with a second volume to come sometime). Downsides are a fair bit of novelistic "filling in" of unknowable detail and a nudge-nudge, wink-wink attitude to Sinatra's horndog exploits that verges on the grubby.

Bruce - a bio of Springsteen by Peter Ames Carlin. This was a Christmas present and not something I'd have bought for myself. I was a keen Springsteen fan for around a year or so back in the day but now I can't understand how I could every have enjoyed his music very much. The lyrics and persona are fine but the music is rhythmically and texturally leaden. He's had an interesting life though and this bio, well-researched and sympathetic without being adulatory, is very good of its type.

How It All Began - Penelope Lively. The only Lively I'd read before was Moon Tiger which I thought was terrific. HIAB represents a vertiginous drop in quality from that. Barely a notch above an Aga saga and the basic intellectual concept (the book is supposed to be a kind of illustration of the butterfly effect) isn't explored in an interesting way. But it was an easy and reasonably enjoyable read, so I followed it with

According to Mark - Penelope Lively. This much earlier novel was substantially better while still having too many flaws for me to want to make any great claims for it. An enjoyable escapist read though.

Jerusalem The Golden - Margaret Drabble. First Drabble I've read and I loved it. I had somehow got it into my head that Drabble would be a bit worthy and dry, but this wasn't in the least. Unfortunately skimming through some reviews I get the impression that this won't be typical of her work.

it's pretty cold for autumn now

anybody read Stevenson's Master of Ballentrae?

Autumn shall reign perpetual, until somebody starts a 2013 WAYR thread.

it's the best season; might as well extend it

anybody read Stevenson's Master of Ballentrae?

― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 7 January 2013 23:03 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Started reading it at the end of a long Stevenson kick, and decided at that point it was time to end my long Stevenson kick. Found it hard-ish going. That's a 'no', btw.

fwiw, the new 2013 wayr thread has begun.