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

"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.

Currently reading "At Mrs Lippincote's" which has started very well. Recent reads include "The Folks That Live On The Hill" (Amis), decent but a bit disappointing. I think it may be the only one of his mainstream novels I hadn't read and I expected it to be better. Also "Tigers in Red Weather'" seduced by the Stevens quotation but it was not much better than stock airport fare. Been sporadically re-reading chunks of Ulysses.

"At Mrs Lippincote's": looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooove this book

thought oscar wao was arch as hell

Yes Mrs Lippincote great so far. With it being Taylor's first it I thought might be a bit thin, but the hit rate of really great observational sentences in the first few chapters is better than in any other book of hers I've read. It surprised me a bit because I don't normally think of her as that kind of writer. She also seems to be giving freer reign to a sardonic streak that's always there in her work but maybe she felt she ought to tone down a little later on.

Too bad about Tigers. On the other hand, it justifies my decision to leave it on the shelf so yay.

i love at mrs. lippincote's too. that's a great one. but i've never really read a book of hers that i didn't like.

i started reading another book by...lee child. i've really gone around the bend. but they are like candy. my dad gave me one for my birthday and i have some of the paperbacks that someone left at the store. i haven't read shoot-em-up/crime/thrillers since i used to read andrew vachss books years ago. kinda similar in some ways. same deadpan/fatalism thing. maybe it helps that lee child is british. he's not a bad writer. and he is definitely good at getting the suspense going in a big way until the final showdown. anyway, they are entertaining and the first honest to gosh modern NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER author i have read in forever. i think i'm becoming a survivalist in my old age. probably gonna start hoarding supplies in the basement soon. between these books and watching season two of the walking dead i've been thinking about exit strategies a lot.

so sad for reacher fans that tom cruise is playing him in the movie. so weird. reacher being 6 foot five and the hugest person alive in the books.

what other crime/thriller etc writers/books does your dad like? Been meaning to ask you that.

elmore leonard. james lee burke. i think he likes michael connelly okay. stephen dobyns. actually, he got me into dobyns too. who i really ended up liking for his poetry! he's a great poet. he lives up where my folks live near saratoga. his mystery books are set there. i think he likes hiaasen too. oh and he really really liked lisa scottoline for a long time. don't know if he still reads her though. and there is a guy who lives up the road from ME and i'm blanking on his name...archer mayor! writes about brattleboro. i should read those for the local color. probably lots of trips to greenfield. oh and i think he reads the john sandford books. think i've seen those at his place.

so i guess world-weary/no-nonsense with a sentimental streak. guess that could describe a lot of crime people. he's not big on csi type procedural stuff. just dudes looking for clues and kicking ass. aging jazz fans. clint types.

I wonder if he would like Teresa Carpenter's nonfiction Missing Beauty? Really well-paced, dense, clear, urban Mass social mapping, how this wayward former high school big girl on campus encounters her nerdcore equivalent (prodigy who discovers just how many science degrees per square inch are to be found in urban Mass[he already knew how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall]). Think Carpenter won the Pulitzer for that one, but it's pretty good anyway.

Pavese - Devil in the Hills. One of my favourite writers these days - on this one he has displays a truly beautiful and detailed descriptions of nature and the hills (an area he grew up in). Two things: 1) they often strain toward what you think as repetition and yet he comes up with a killer variation -- an acute observation from a different angle, really five degrees not 180; and 2) sometimes he'll repeat an action being performed, say, the way the sun keeps baking bodies, but he'll layer it with their actions -- steadily and assuredly corrupt actions, destructive actions around drink and drugs and relationships -- that gives all of these descriptions something meaningfully savage, not just an exercise in nature documentary. The misogny sprinkled gives it a power, a dark energy will repulse and yet keep drawing you inn too, especially if you've read his diaries where he has these awful affairs, all of whom ended in failure gving rise to periods of intense self-loathing (though it wsn't just because of this).

Hammett - Red Harvest. The drinking that goes on in these bks was noted at a FAP (over a drink of course). Again its about more of a law-breaking corruption, not as arresting as Pavese's (can't help to compare as I happen to have read one book after the other) so I kept focused on the bits around drinking.

Pauline Reage - The Story of O (and no I didn't know Sylvie Kristel passed away a few days ago) (the film version of this and Emmanuelle ws made by the same guy)

I'm about halfway through The Pale King and it makes me sad to think DFW had this stuff pushed out in the world while it was still a foetus. Also, it reminds me that he was a better stylist than sociologist. His extended analyses of Big Social Trends are unfortunately sophomoric.

The setup in the introduction about how DFW was boldly tackling the theme of boredom just doesn't fit the book I am reading. But it would be unfair to judge DFW by this uneven mess. Publishing this was all about squeezing some final dollars out of a popular author.

do you think? i think there was a legitimate demand for it and he wanted it published in some state or another

by comparison

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/2/2e/Although_Of_Course.jpg/250px-Although_Of_Course.jpg

http://www.slate.com/content/dam/slate/archive/2010/12/1_123125_123050_2240796_2277115_101220_cb_fatetimeandlanguage_tn.jpg

http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/thisiswater.jpg

i'm not sure what the idea that 'he wanted it published' is based on, but if he did, then so be it. there it is.

i believe he arranged some of it into a preliminary order with a note giving his family dispensation to arrange for its publication. i guess that's not quite the same as "he wanted it published."

just dudes looking for clues and kicking ass. aging jazz fans. clint types.

there is of course a crime-solving jazzbo series:

http://www.billmoodyjazz.com/books.html

x-posting back to junot diaz, last week some co-workers were discussing oscar wao so i chimed in w/"read feast of the goat." they never heard of vargas llosa, of course. diaz is GREAT at capturing contemporary voices and attitudes, to my anglo ears at least, but in a way i think he would be a better non-fiction writer a nuevo journalist if you will.

man "this is water" was gross

it'd be OK as an 'inspirational' tumblr piece that all my friends linked to on fb but i am genuinely baffled by ppl who look up to DFW as some kind of lovable saint who had deep wisdom to impart. this is a guy who was thoughtful enough to organize his last manuscript for posthumous publication but not thoughtful enough to commit suicide in a place where his wife wouldn't be the first to stumble on his body.

I've enjoyed some Wallace but never understood the reverence. The philosophical po-mo bullshit cluttering up much of his non-fiction, the bandana, the self-help book obsession...

the bandana is kind of a deal breaker. i have already talked about him enough on this thread! and i never talk about him. i think it was this thread. none of the guys i lump together with him (in my head) thrill me. lethem, dfw, moody, franzen. that whole crowd. at least chabon wrote the mysteries of pittsburgh (haven't read it since it came out but i really liked it. and a short story collection of his. and the movie of wonder boys.)