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

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

lolling so hard @ this comment on Rev's redstate link

_Yet more evidence that we have been living in fantasyland for too long now. I don't want to hear that this is all Romney's fault, or all the campaign's fault. The simple fact is that in the run-up to this election, we were fed a steady diet of lies, from all our "loyal" sources. We need to hold not only the Romney campaign accountable, but also the conservative press (specifically the Murdoch press - Fox was the worst of the bunch), and the establishment talking heads like Karl Rove and Peggy Noonan. We need to get clear about something: these people are selling us a product. They have been taking our money and telling us bedtime stories. We complain about the MSM, but can we honestly say that the conservative press has been more honest?

How do we expect to win elections if we can't even get straight facts about the electorate? But maybe it's our own fault. There was practically a revolt around here when Erik said he didn't think the polls were false. And yet he was right, and they were right. Have we become allergic to the truth?_

Re-reading "To The Lighthouse" for class at the moment. Also read this recently...http://www.amazon.co.uk/British-Social-Realism-Documentary-Short/dp/1903364418

are you on the same course i was on or are these just the books on every literature MA ever

reading Cousin Bette, my first Balzac, in a good modern Oxford translation by Sylvia Raphael. a tremendously enjoyable mishmash of outrageous opinion/authorial sermonising, gossipy prurience, social/political conflict, and intricate melodrama - can see why Balzac was v. important to Henry James.

a lot of the judgements on characters, races, countries, classes etc seem jaw-droppingly...broadbrush...at times; just today this brutal little paragraph made me laugh:
Madame Crevel, rather an ugly woman, very common and stupid, who died none too soon, had given her husband no joys other than those of paternity.

also it is slightly comic to read abt these aristo frenchmen rushing round frantically collecting mistresses even when it costs them their name, reputation, fortune, good lady wife etc

im doing new media and english, thomp. 'to the lighthouse' is on my literary modernism module. other books are 'howards end', 'women in love' some katherine mansfield short stories, a bit of 'ulysses' and 'good morning midnight'

I expect I will be buried in the Thomas Jefferson administration for the foreseeable future. Only 1050 pp yet to read!

thoughts so far?

A few. This book requires a def committment of time; it is slow-paced, but it is very readable. I expect that by the end I will have a very thorough understanding of the political forces of the time and how they all were resolved. Because the country was so young and the whole democratic experiment was so new in the world, these formative years should be pretty fascinating.

Jordan: "black people fanfic"?

Like, scenes where an ex-NFL millionaire, his bodyguard, and everyone else in the room are casually referencing 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' and Isaac Asimov deep cuts. But maybe everyone in Oakland/Berklee is way into the Jewish sci-fi canon and talks about Tarantino constantly.

I don't mean to be too hard on it because I am enjoying it, but I can't help raising an eyebrow from time to time.

thomp: english and comparative literature at Goldsmiths?

hated oscar wao

what for?? explain yrself!

thomp: english and comparative literature at Goldsmiths?

― Blue Collar Retail Assistant (Dwight Yorke), Sunday, 11 November 2012 23:40 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha that wasn't me either. so basically yeah, they all use the same books! that is unsurprising and depressing

i didn't like oscar wao either, oops

i know mine is a minority opinion bc it seems well-liked by a lot of ppl w/ more clout than me, but i thought it exhibited some of the worst aspects of valueless cultural relativism of the "graphic novels are just as good as thomas mann" kind, blatant homophobia (whether diaz is simply mirroring a tendency of dominican culture or not, it's unappealing), a style that seems to try too hard to be "postmodern", and a general philosophical impoverishment of its characters. in his interviews he seems to make a sort of spurious differentiation between the "whiteboy" literature like e.g. david foster wallace and post-colonial "brown folks" literature, which is basically an external criticism that stems from a mindset that rejects the possibility of a useful sort of dynamic synthesis (which is ironic as the novel seems to be all about an attempt to synthesize disparate cultural influences, even if it is actually only heterogeneous).

Finally read Pere Goriot, which sets my headorama (boarding house in-joke) spinning, but still perfectly focused (albeit laughing x crying O SHIT),I assure you. At present, am brrracing self to encounter motormouth M. Vautrin elsewhere in The Human Comedy!

clouds that is a v good summation of how i feel about it, much better than i could have managed, i would have just been like "unnnh shut about jack kirby, GOD"

+up

For the Wao-haters out there, have you read Drown? May raise the same set of problematics but it's less dependent on pop culture references to define everyone and everything in it. (am about to begin an essay on the notion of passing in relation to Oscar's failed attempts at cultural assimilation in both the US and the DR in comparison with the 'successful' passing of Coleman Silk in Roth's Human Stain)

Thomp: Yeah, I've not read anything jawdroppingly great on any of the courses on the MA (did a primer on american lit last year that took us from Thoreau to Auster, a postmodernist fiction course that, Pale Fire aside, was largely dull (and was essentially a course in which the novel in question was a conduit for another boring conversation about the nature of reality etc) this term I'm doing 21st

...century American fiction, next term it'll be Literature and Philosophy.

I normally try and writer about off-course texts anyway, so ended up doing my essays last year on Clement Greenberg's art criticism in conjunction with beat writing (linking action painting with 'action writing' etc) and postmodern architecture and the urban imagination.

Prompted by posts above and wanting to see if John E Woods' translations are as engaging as people say, rereading The Magic Mountain (or rather 'rereading' - I read it when I was about 15 or 16 and v ambitious or pretentious, so obviously have next to no memory of what happens in it except that there are some debates about time or something and nothing much happens), and although I've thought H T Lowe-Porter has a bad rap and is perfectly readable if a little stiff (I went through the first 20 pages of hers too, for the sake of science), this is obviously a better or more present version - readable, precise, feels like there's more tonal subtlety.

there are some debates about time or something

ha

i might join you. but then i always say i will do this on these threads. and then i don't.

dwight i bought 'drown', diaz seemed fundamentally talented enough i didn't want to write him off. but then i haven't read it because, you know, effort. also i like him in interviews.

If you only ever read one other thing by Diaz make it 'Aurora' from that collection - a genuine masterpiece of a short story IMO.

I'll stop going on about him now. Just picked up my first issue of Bookforum...should I expect good things?

there are some debates about time or something and nothing much happens

the #1 thing i was looking for when i read MM was the same thing that's telegraphed so much at the beginning, the experience of seven years of time passing, put into novel/narrative form, and for a long time i was expecting to be disappointed, and then somewhere way through the book, i was like, hey, hans has been here forever, or is it really only five years? etc.

Drown is full of wonderful stories but yeah, Aurora might be the best (if it's the one I'm thinking of - the junkie girlfriend one?). Is his collected work available online or anywhere? I don't fancy Oscar Wao for some reason, but I read an SF story in the NYer about an epidemic in Haiti which was terrific.

that was an excerpt from his novel-in-progress (apparently he's been trying to write a sci-fi book for years). He has a new story collection out now though

hi ILB! I have started reading again after a long uninentional hiatus brought about by procrastination :)

am currently reading:
Laurence Bergreen - Over The Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe.
Only a little ways in but really enjoying it.

also aquired from the library:
River of Doubt, the book about Teddy Roosevelt in the Amazon
Collapse - Jared Diamond.
dunno, was kidn of in and adventure/exploration/ancient civilizations mood, lol.

just recently finished Anthony Flacco's Road Out Of Hell abt the Wineville murders. So the adventure stuff is kind of a palate cleanser

National Book Award winners and others, anybody read 'em?
http://shelf-life.ew.com/2012/11/14/national-book-awards-2012-winners/