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

I tossed the Wales book aside. I'm just not so in love with Wales that I needed to read a book-length love letter.

Jim Harrison: The Woman Lit by Fireflies -- 3 novellas. Only started the first one, but loving this so far, after reading a couple of dud books recently I can't even be bothered to type the full titles of

Edith Wharton again, "Souls Belated" collection. So far they're reading like a kind of history 101 of divorce becoming a socially acceptable thing. Which is fine, I mean you can easily get a similar schooling in historical social mores from Austen, say, and it's a period I hadn't really given much thought to before.

yesterday at lunch (Moe's), sitting alone reading (Les Fleurs du Mal), a guy (there with his girl, student sorts) who kept looking at me (with vaguely irritated curiosity) approached my table just before leaving to demand (with same vaguely irritated curiosity) "WHAT BOOK???" (his exact words)

I held it up so he could see it, and fullmouthedly mumbled "Baudelaire". which, now that I think about it, was not the correct answer to his question.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51SoM7PE%2BTL._SS500_.jpg

Bernard Snowy, yesterday.

I'm following this manga, btw, and enjoying it. the third part (of four) is out next week in English (or maybe in England).

I'm reading "Hearing Secret Harminies", the final part of Anthomy Powell's "A Dance To The Music Of Time", which is just magnificent and I don't want it to end.

Edith Wharton again, "Souls Belated" collection. So far they're reading like a kind of history 101 of divorce becoming a socially acceptable thing. Which is fine, I mean you can easily get a similar schooling in historical social mores from Austen, say, and it's a period I hadn't really given much thought to before.

It's gonna be my mission to make people read more Wharton.

My Last Breath by Luis Bunuel. Highly entertaining discursive ramble over the great auteur's life and work - although Bunuel acknowledges the contribution of screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere, the tone throughout is consistent, extremely idiosyncratic and very very Bunuelian. It's also filled with the most jaw-dropping name-dropping you'll ever come across, eg "Every Saturday, Chaplin invited out little group of Spanish refugees out for dinner. In fact, I often went to his house on the hillside to play tennis, swim, or use the sauna. Every once in a while, Eistenstein would drop by"

Cain - Saramago. it's ok. no more , no less.

'tess of the d'urbervilles' -- first hardy i've ever read. dimly remember the plot from seeing the polanski version a decade ago. first impression: great writing -- vivid and even funny.

Roth When She Was Good. It's good, very good, but I'm reading it all wrong. Twenty minutes each way on my commute means the intensity dissipates too easily. I feel I ought to sit with it for two-hour stretches - time to get a new job maybe.

> 'tess of the d'urbervilles'
> first impression: great writing -- vivid and even funny.

give it a hundred pages...

There's a hilarious scene involving Tess and her baby. A real knee slapper.

well even at this point the plot isn't exactly funny, but there's something kind of arch and knowing about hardy's tone as a narrator that clashes a bit with what i remember of the story.

i just finished it last sunday and it was good but it gets quite grim even though i didn't immediately understand what had happened in the forest. seemed a very small world towards the end as well, with lots of people from first half popping up in second half. impressed by the postal service of the time though 8)

Hardy often and correctly gets his knuckles rapped for generic nature descriptions with an overlay of cynical wink-winking, written in carpentered prose; but the scene at the dairy farm is one of the simplest and most lyrical I've ever read.

I was surprised when i first read Hardy how much humour there was. Some of it pretty black, but still, didn't match up with my preconceptions.

Joseph Roth: Tarabas -- I've been rationing out my last few J Roths, and only have 2 more left after this one. Damn these fuckers who die young.

Whatever James Wood's sins I owe him for introducing me to Roth.

weird someone else reading Hardy, I just finished Jude the Obscure (my first of his, tho I started Return of the Native once)—found it a very enjoyable read. also the old paperback I 'borrowed' from my dad's shelf has this hilarious cover:

http://static.issyvoo.com/cover/jude-the-obscure/show_edca58c655fcceae3110d8b5fe86f01d.jpg

the Egdon Heath intro of The Return of the Native is exactly what I had in mind about Hardy's ponderousness.

But the guy's one of my four or five favorite novelists. And those love lyrics from 1912 destroy me.

ya I really enjoyed the poetry of his I read!

The intro to Return of the Native was lovely. I fell asleep immediately after finishing... but it was lovely, too.

(after finishing that chapter, I mean)

I forgot to mention that I recently read The Periodic Kingdom, P.W. Atkins, a survey of chemistry mainly focussed on the periodic table of the elements and the modern understanding of their atomic structure. It had a few slips into the style of Mr. Science Explains It All And Makes It Fun, but 95% of it was just a readable synopsis and a nice change from fiction.

I'm now reading The Pale King. Its unfinished nature is hard to miss, but it has some good writing and it shows where DFW's approach was headed after IJ.

"weird someone else reading Hardy, I just finished Jude the Obscure"

doubleweird..i just started Jude the Obscure!

I finished Freeman Dyson's Disturbing the Universe. It's a pretty interesting book, but as a memoir, it has a slight structural problem, which is that it peaks rather early.

http://s12.postimage.org/ctbg5fmpn/Rochester_detail.jpg

i started jude on a long plane ride some 3 years ago and have neglected it since. it was christmastime and i'd just gotten some wire and buffy DVDs i should really get around to finishing it

finished hamlet (also on a plane ride! i'm really not about the jet life, i swear) last week. think i'm going to start turgenev's on the eve tonight on alfred's recommendation (and because it's short). loved loved loved first love

whoops

...buffy DVDs, and i got lost in those.

I got your back.

Dumas - The Three Musketeers. Just started.

just read

Pohl - The Gateway Trip (which isn't very good, being mostly a low-reading-grade-level recap of the series, also repeating themes that were done just fine in the first book, the only one i had read)
King - Night Shift (which is great)
Carr - The Blind Barber (above average mystery, not locked room as Carr was known for)

now reading

Chabon - Telegraph Avenue
Lethem - Fear of Music

went mental on donald barthelme but stalled on "teachings of don.b" which seemed to consist of "shooting fish in a barrel"level-satire, and stuff which didn't make the cut. hyperbolic foreword by my arch nemesis pyncho helped none. ditched "vineland" 40 pages from the end, could not have cared less how it might end.
just done david ohle's "the devil in kansas", which was an easy breeze of a read, if not really ohle at all until the last 20 pages. read like a compendium of barry gifford screenplays, nowhere near the level of rug pulling dream-weirdness i expected. feel shortchanged.

I've been bumbling around among public domain adventure stories from 1900-1920-ish and was v pleased with The Man on the Box by Harold McGrath, more so than the general run of little New York City-centric mystery & dramas I've been finding. The narration was a little more knowing and confiding in the reader? (Although it's super cool to read about people catching hansom cabs to places in NY or reference to the 2nd Ave El or whatever. which is half of why I read these.)

The Incomplete Amorist by Edith Nesbit was also an odd gem, I think? I never realized she'd written other than children's books.

Just bought Wolf Flow by K.W. Jeter: gonna see if I can read thru that before Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? arrives via interlibrary loan

Recently read:

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Margaret Atwood, Surfacing
Michael Ondaatje, In The Skin of a Lion

Liked the first two, not a fan of the latter. Just can't get into Ondaatje.

I went for David Byrne overload - both his new How Music Works and also Jonathan Lethem's 33 1/3 entry on Fear of Music. Byrne's book is great so far.

Ha, yeah me too. Got the Byrne book for my birthday (along with his album with St. Vincent). The Byrne book is really really good.

just finished The Brief & Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—immensely enjoyable, but I'm still not sure what to make of it. it feels like a book that wants to be 'talked about', but I'm so late to the party on this that I wouldn't know where to look for the critical conversation...

... it has also kindled in me a desire to read Vargas Llosa's Feast of the Goat, though, since A.) I've never read him, B.) the 'novelization' of life under the Trujillo regime made for some of the most compelling parts of Oscar Wao, and C.) Diaz explicitly refers to Vargas Llosa's book at least once.

I had the exact same reaction. Bought Feast of the Goat but still haven't gotten around to it

That's the comparison that stuck out when by coincidence I read both books in a two-week stretch...and Oscar Wao wilted, I'm afraid. The Dominican slang sounded too writer's workshop to me.

not sure how Dominican slang and a workshop are connected at all. workshops don't work that way.

At the workshops I've attended "Work on slang to make characters more life-like" is a constant thing.

someone said that directly? kinda find that hard to believe. i can see someone saying "you need to work on your dialogue," or something along those lines, but i've never heard those two ideas being connected.

and i've been in lots of workshops, too.

I live in South Florida. Making characters life-like by dropping, say, Cuban slang into dialogue was a refrain at our creative writing department.

i can believe someone saying work on your slang to make it sound more authentic which is one thing, but never add slang to this to make it seem more lifelike, which is another thing entirely.

and yeah it's a good intention that often doesn't work; the dialogue often sounds even more stilted.

well, even so, it's still a weird critique. people code switch all the time, why not add that to fiction?

i guess what we are dancing around is the large point of: most writers in workshops suck at dialog? i can get behind that.

No lie: I had to look up "code switch." We just call it Spanglish here lol

D. K. Goodwin's Team of Rivals

t Alfred: I get where yr coming from about the slang—those constant N-bombs from the narrator were initially offputting but then I thought, maybe this is how (some) Dominicans actually talk? struck me as kind of an awkward first-generation overcompensation thing, which seemed plausible in context.

I would need to reread to confirm this (and maybe compare with the stories in Drown?), but I never got the impression that the slang in Oscar Wao was a crutch; just one component of Diaz's style, which impressed me as a likably vulgar (in all senses of the word) variant on DFW-style postmodern irony.