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

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.

I think its a really unique piece.

Kenzaburo Oe - Silent Cry. So is this! From '67, so it uses that energy for a look back to political upheavals in Japanese history and politics (from the post-war capitulation to Western capitalist interests to 1868 and all that!), and goes hard into the personal: using brotherly conflict as metaphor for a country that is not talking to one another, that cannot comprehend what they say with their own language -- which flows into the bits about literary translation (the main protagonists' collaborator has commited suicide; the wheels are always made to turn here!), in a country as isolated as Japan this might have been an exotic occupation.

To be read alongside films made by Nagisa Oshima in this period:a lot here about criminals as outlaws as part-revolutionaries too, and the treatment of Korean immigrants at the hand of Japanese peasants -- way too much here, and I order my thoughts badly -- but so much resonates, even if the characters and human drama might get left out a bit but that could be me not treating this as a mere novel.

You can see the comparison w/something like Fathers and Sons (halfway thru' at the moment). The relationships and romanticism, its snappy dialogue more satisfyingly handled and overall soberly alternated with 'deep' political/philosophical discussions. Perhaps a better novel but Oe's time is different altogether. Blood gusehes from the pages in both, and that's what is needed.

i read that in a day when i was 18 or 19 and thought it was just about the best thing i had ever read

i suppose i knew it was one of those instances of perfect susceptibility so i never read another oe book

"DL, have you read Mailer's St. George and the Godfather?"

Not yet dow, but I'm sure I will. Love the unedited Q&A with McGovern at the end of F&L72. I don't think I've ever read such a candid and thorough post-defeat interview talking about what went wrong - or at least what the candidate thinks went wrong. The scale of McGovern's defeat has always fascinated me. He comes across as a solid guy who's just been hit over the head by a hammer.

I just started The Long Ships, which is dry and deft and very funny so far. You wouldn't think!

I mean for being about Viking raids and killing people out of hand and raping their women.

:The scale of McGovern's defeat" yeah--I said "everybody knew what was at stake," but maybe I should have made it "everybody likely to have read Mailer's book when it first came out." Kenzaburo Oe's A Personal Matter is about a young man whose first son is developmentally-disabled, so Daddy freaks out and runs off into urban Japan's grey shambolic fringes--"underworld doesn't quite say it, but a ready context for his own state of mind. I hadn't yet seen any 60s Japanese movies about that environment when I read the novel, which was a graphic jolt. His son's brain requires immediate attention, so this is from the father's first glimpse:
Bird began to cry. Head in bandages, like Apollinaire: the image simplified his feelings instantly and directed them. . . and him, the hell away from there.

I just finished The Long Ships! Rollicking! Nice and dry.

I slightly wonder how much of that is in the original Swedish and how much was the translator's good judgment? Not that it matters.

browsing in library after finishing a reasonably long chapter in the perspective of the world by braudel and before going for a walk in st james' park.

picked up The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by E Larson, about the Chicago Exhibition. Obv an interesting subject anyway, but I was also pulled in by the Pynchon/Against the Day link.

I'm a sucker for that sort of hack history style, and I was several pages in before I reluctantly had to put it back on the shelf.

See from Wikipedia that the film rights have been sold

I just read that last month. Frederick Law Olmsted was a particularly fascinating character

What's the significance of the Chicago Exhibition? It seems to come up a lot.

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.