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

Halldor Laxness: The Atom Station -- enjoyed this quite a lot, though also frequently mystified/confused. Did nothing to dispel my preconceptions of Icelanders as an odd people.

Virginia Woolf fans: how does Jacob's Room fit within her body of work? I get what's going on here, but it's all so fragmented and elliptical that it leaves me with little to grasp onto.

it's been about 18 years but my impressions too.

aimless i sometimes think you are the only person i have ever rationally assess dfw without an axe to grind one way or the other

I finished Philip Roth's When She Was Good. Again, all the elements have always been there, but you can see that now he's hit on his thing of getting the hook in and twisting it, and twisting it, and twisting it until you're as wound up as everyone in the book.

This one had a really odd almost perspective shift in the last section, so that I found my sympathies all at odds with where they'd been hitherto. Very strange, and very neat, to make you root for someone all book and then turn the tables so deftly; I can't recall reading anything quite like it.

It was kinda odd to read a Roth with no Jewish characters. I don't feel like he really got under the skin of Catholicism though, insofar as he was using it as a substitute - all the characters seemed to feed off repression, whether catholic or not, which is fine on its own but I do feel he was partly aiming for loftier themes.

without an axe to grind one way or the other

That's the beauty of knowing one's opinions about books are purely irrelevant to the world at large.

Last night I picked up and started the History of the United States: 1801-1809 by Henry Adams, as reissued by the Library of America. It's too soon to tell if it will 'stick', but HA is definitely using Edward Gibbon as his model, even if his prose is unlikely to sustain that level of exquisiteness.

Haha -- not true. Give it about thirty pages. He WAS our Gibbon.

I spent most of last summer reading it, and part of my graduate thesis used a fair chunk of Adams' essays, and although his posing could be tedious -- he's the scion-who-never-was, the guy who wanted to be asked to lead foreign policy but was too noble to beg -- the calibrated irony is almost European in its breadth.

i have the first of those adams books but haven't cracked it yet.

i wish there were someone out there writing a gibbon-esque history of the post-1945 u.s.

So far I've only read two Adams novels, Esther and Democracy, both pretty droll. Did he write any more fiction? I'll read the history etc. someday (have read excerpts)

That's about it. "Droll" is apt.

My fave character is based on Blaine from Maine (wonder if he read it)

I bought my other half Alice Munro's Hateship, Loveship, Friendship, Courtship, Marriage; she hadn't started it so I thought I'd give it a go. I wondered whether it'd stick - small-town Canada is about the most boring setting I can think of. My fears lasted about three pages. This is masterful.

haha god yes

YES

Amazon had Blanchot's Lautreamont & Sade for 9 bucks, so I ordered that + Maldoror (in the Paul Knight translation); I've taken out both from the library before and found them immensely enjoyable. looking forward to singing the praises of evil again this winter.

... ack wrong thread!

Just finished Morrissey: the pageant of his bleeding heart. If you love him and like reading academic stuff about literature, this is your book. Seriously academic, but not dull. Also read the newest Augusten Burroughs, This is how - his take on the self-help book. Very insightful essays about dealing with various emotions and truly dire problems. It was the perfect bookend to Morrissey.

So I've only just finished the first of the Munro stories, but I wanted to say to everyone on here who ever talked her up - you were so right.

This is masterful.
On the basis of this comment, I have bought HLFCM and added it to the queue.

Uh-oh - if this takes a massive nosedive I'll feel bad alright.

You're more likely to enjoy it if you feel pressured to find it good, yeah? Anyway, it was about 40p second-hand, so it's hardly a crippling investment.

"Floating Bridge," Ismael.

I finished the first book of stories in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. Some good stuff - emotionally raw at times, makes you wince - but artfully put together. I thought a change of pace would be nice before continuing, so now I'm reading some stories from Steven Millhauser's recent collection We Others. An interesting contrast to the Eisenberg.

how was tess of d'urbervilles in the end?

And did you read the version with or without the undies/cliff scene?

Just started Hatchet Jobs - Dale Peck.

just got to the heavy dialect part in the middle of Cloud Atlas. the next 50 pages will be heavy going.

(also, that's another thing that makes me think of iain m banks as well as the odd palindromic structure)

reading 'i am charlotte simmons' - is fairly engrossing, not as embarrassing as i thought itd be, reminding me of curtis sittenfeld's 'prep'

like a chapter from finishing the steve jobs bio - is fine, mostly hero worship, he sucks as a person

collected amy hempel stories

gonna also start 'the league' a history of the nfl up to like ~'86

http://i43.tower.com/images/mm100008373/murder-in-memoriam-didier-daeninckx-paperback-cover-art.jpg

Its a bit weak as a detective novel I think but the historical stuff (nazi collaborators, the algerian massacre in Paris, 1961) is shocking

I'm about 2/3rds through the new Chabon ('Telegraph Avenue'). The writing is good and I'm enjoying it, but it has moments that read like black people fanfic.

Just finished a review copy of the new (Jan 2013) George Saunders collection---REALLY uneven. He has a few more realistic stories in it, and it really throws the emptiness of the non-realistic stories into sharp relief. Also opens with the longest, weakest story, which seems like a bad idea. But the final story was great.

anyone here read any of Kevin Barry's stuff? I notice he had a story in last week's New Yorker and i'm curious how he comes across to non-Irish readers. I love his writing but I feel like a lot of the humour would be lost if you're not familiar with the distinctly Irish turns of phrase he captures so well

In 2007 he won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for his short story collection There are Little Kingdoms.[1]

uncanny

http://i.imgur.com/dzdKA.png

He has confessed to "haunting bookshops and hiding" to "spy on the short fiction section and see if anyone's tempted by my sweet bait" and has also placed copies of his own work in front of books by other “upcoming” authors.[5]

so have you read any of his stories then

Am now one chapter into The Line Of Beauty.

Jordan: "black people fanfic"?

Just finished a review copy of the new (Jan 2013) George Saunders collection---REALLY uneven. He has a few more realistic stories in it, and it really throws the emptiness of the non-realistic stories into sharp relief. Also opens with the longest, weakest story, which seems like a bad idea. But the final story was great.

― ornamental cabbage (James Morrison), Thursday, 8 November 2012 22:24 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I predict I will have a completely opposite set of reactions to this.

i really liked his most recent nyer story

Roth says he's done (writing):
http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2012/11/prolific_author_philip_roth_sa.html

Re-read Junot Diaz's Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao the other day, still a stunning, flawless novel IMO.

Trying to tuck into The Known World by Edward P Jones for my MA course for this term (the 21st Century American Novel) - finding it a really arduous read so far...I just don't get on with historical fiction in general, and it's...not very exciting? Maybe it gets better.

that was on my MA last year. no one liked it.

Haven't read that, but I really really like his short stories, Lost In The City and several published since, though haven't yet gotten the second collection, All Aunt Hagar's Children The first is about black people in various D.C. neighborhoods over several decades. A bit like August Wilson. So far, I never guess where where or how his plots will go, with one exception, which seems like slick crime fiction, but even that's more of a character study than the exertion of twists. Still, I can see how he might get courted by TV or Hollywood (hope Paul Thomas Anderson gets him, or Eastwood).

Finished Do Androids Dream?: clearly that should've been my first PKD novel. Really, really good. Now onto Ubik. While I'm waiting for my local public library to get that in, I will probably turn to another Sagittarian--a quick re-read of Conrad's N----- of the Narcissus

Dunno how ILB regards Willa Cather, probably the most consistently excellent American novelist of the post-WWI period. Started reding Shadows on the Rock cuz I've read the Big Novels already

Yeah, I heard a composition by Thomas "Blind Tom" Wiggins (didn't catch the performer's name) a few days ago, and immediately thought of the description of his playing in My Antonia Have you read The Professor's House? Been a lomg time, but I really got into it. She really didn't care for the social pretentions and shibboleths of the sons and daughters of the pioneers. "Meanwhile life outside goes on all around you",

Dunno how ILB regards Willa Cather,

I regard her as FUCKING ACE, for what it's worth