ILB Gripped the Steps and Other Stories. What Are You Reading Now, Spring 2017

A successor to A Model TrILBY; or, What Are You Reading Now, Winter 2016/17

Carver - Cathedral

and

Queneau - Exercises in Style

To continue the Cather discussion started by Aimless: yes, I don't doubt the Pulitzer thought OFO's topicality put it over. Their picks in the '20s were schizophrenic: accommodating modernity but only after taking a couple lateral steps. Wharton's The Age of Innocence beat Main Street because Lewis' novel shocked too many voters; in 2017 I suspect most of us think the crew made the right decision regardless.

I finished Jane Mayer and Doyle McManus' essential Landslide for a paper I'm writing and have moved on to Pynchon's Bleeding Edge

(Now regretting not using a colon or at least a semicolon in thread title)

Steve Pinker's Language Instinct. I read this 15 or so years ago but I feel I've learned a whole bunch since then so giving it another go. I find him kinda hectoring but I can't argue with the clarity (albeit some of the deeper grammar modelling is a bit beyond me). Is it still considered canonical or is there something else I should be reading?

Spending a lotof time looking through a book of cooking ingredients since getting into putting more Asian etc greens in stir fries recently.

Errornomics by Joseph Hallinan book on making mistakes. PIcked this up in a charity shop a while back and it's come to the top of the pile for bog books. I think I finished something I was just reading also have been shuffling things around since i finally got my sower rail done after way too long and had to have things outof there while it was done.

Think i'm still mainly reading Surviving by Henry Green as a transport book but since bus strike is on not sitting on buses to read it.

Queneau - Exercises in Style

love this book.

^^ It's great. Have you seen the comic it inspired, which illustrates in 99 different comic styles a man working at his desk while his wife calls to him from the next room? http://mattmadden.com/comics/99x/

Am currently reading Denton Welch: Maiden Voyage, which is marvellous, Can't believe he was only in his 20s when he wrote it, the precocious fucker.

I've been meaning to read Queneau's Le Chiendent/BarkTree/Witch Grass since it turned up in Rowland S Howard's Portrait of The Artist as a Consumer in the early 80s. Did start it as Bark Tree I think in the mid 80s but didn't finish it. Assume Witch Grass is a totally different translation.
Georges Perec is also good if you're into weird French stuff.

Zazie dans le metro is also good by Queneau.

I love Denton Welch and totally agree on the precocious fucker call. He strikes me as one of those characters who were 'borrowed from death'. Recommend the journals if you can get hold of the them.

need to read the welch collection i have, maybe after the compton-burnett

xpost: think witch grass also uses the barbara wright translation (not sure if there are any others)

Im reading and enjoying David Byrne's "How Music Works"

just finished the ginger man - gotta say i'm glad it's over. i really enjoyed parts of it but dunno if it has aged very well - the main character is such a terrible prat, which is one thing, and the violence against women and general misogyny is another, but also it's sort of unbelievable and a bit false to me. like this character is supposed to be american, behaves like a posh british person, but the author imbues him with some form of irishness too. it might be possible to balance all these things but it comes across extremely confused. it's also just so cartoonish. there's no real centre to the story and the character's journey doesn't make much sense. there are far better books in the irish wastrel pantheon.

next up i'll prob read these:

knausgaard 2 - a man in love - going on holiday next week so might as well go back to this trashy/easy world. the cover is so embarrassing i'm almost unwilling to read it in public.
mark o'connell - to be a machine - irish guy has a book about transhumanism - sounds interesting.
richard yates - liars in love - read his other collection last year so figure i'll like this

Is the Byrne book any good? It's sitting on my shelf unread.

Yeah I'm really enjoying it, a lot of stuff about how tech and context shapes music (slightly ilm-ish at times even!) and a fair bit concerning the creative process behind his own music.

Reading more Lispector atm. Thinking about getting some Katherine Mansfield, I've never read her. Any ILB recommendations for best collection?

I was a bit disappointed by Exercises in Style when I first read it, while still enjoying it a lot. I think my thing is that while I've always loved the ideas of Oulipo, only Perec really managed to create something that was both a fun formalist experiment AND a world that resonated with me.

Mansfield's Bliss and The Garden Party, the second and third of the three collections she published during her lifetime, have most of her strongest writing, as far as I can tell.

On the most recent What Are You Reading or maybe the one before that, I got cranked up about Stories---Vintage trade pb, ISBN 0-679-73374-4, intro by Jeffrey Meyers (not always perceptive, I say): 28 stories, from early to very late (and the first, though written in 1908, wasn't published 'til 1924, the year after her death). The POV and voice are always there, even in the apprentice work, and despite some occasionally obvious influences (incl. magazine editors) along the way, and when she really gets going (somewhere in every selection and all of quite a few), omg.

Agreed on Exercises in Styles and almost all Queneau and Oulipo. Diverting, kinda slight..

Perec is often great (Species of Spaces collection above everthing else) and I want to engage with his work again. I'd add Harry Mathews to that.

Ah yes, I've been meaning to ask: anyone have any particular Mathews recommendations? Interested in actually being able to read some Oulipo in the original language.

(Although I must say the translation of e.g. <i>Life a User's Manual</i> (which I read recently and looooved) seemed to me to have survived translation impressively well, based on my occasional cross-referring to the original (which I certainly don't have enough French to properly read).)

gnah bbcode sorry

would agree with the evaluation of bliss/the garden party above. the penguin collected km should be easy to find and has her three original volumes + some posthumous collections.

about a third of the way into ivy compton-burnett's a family & a fortune: lots of (so far) unspoken familial tension. most struck by her remarkable ability to conjure up quite vivid images with little more than dialogue.

Haven't posted in a bit since fitfully starting to a few months ago. Since my last post, I've read and would warmly recommend: Rachel Cusk's Transit, Coetzee's Scenes from Provincial Life, Victor Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary, and Tim Lawrence's history of NYC nightlife/music in the early 1980s (Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor).

Up next for me: Paul Beatty's Sellout, Kamel Daouad's Merseult Investigation, and - after months on hold from my library and my forgetting about it until it arrived last week - Chris Kraus' I Love Dick (which I'd never gotten around to despite wanting to - the (pretty good) Amazon TV pilot of the adaptation renewed my interest in it)).

Anyone read Sellout and have any thoughts on it? I was initially skeptical but have since come around and am looking forward to reading it.

The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake has proved to be quite good. It is well-researched, well-structured, clearly written, level-headed, and knows just how much detail is enough for an intelligent lay reader to follow the evidence and get the point, without feeling the need to exhaustively prove its case to academic historians or specialists. The author is not a gifted stylist, such as Barbara Tuchman, but more than good enough to keep my interest at a simmer. Good stuff.

Reading Red Shift by Alan Garner. I wasn't sure at first - too dialogue heavy, too riddled with elisions - but it's grown on me. Kitchen sink landscape mysticism? It might just catch on.

This is a bit Books 101, but I read The Dead today, my first ever Joyce, without knowing anything about the story, or about Joyce really.

Anyway - so much to love - not just the ending (which I gather is famous) but the party section too, which reminded me of a showoffy long take from a Welles movie, and the tension of the cab home, and the constant dread even though the story itself seems quite joyous and full of light incident. I feel like I'll be able to read it every ten years for the rest of my life and feel something different every time.

You might like John Huston's film version too. I came to Dubliners very late, about 40 years after reading A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man and Ulysses in school, and was bowled over. I know some people who don't care for any of his others, but love these early stories. Not me, but---wow.
And don't worry about Books 101; several of us are still catching up. As mentioned upthread, I recently/finally enjoyed Swann's Way (Lydia Davis translation), and only in part because I realized how much Swann and I had in common, a while back---but today I was relieved to get to the end of "At Mme. Swann's", midway through In The Shadow of Young Girls In Flower (James Grieve translation). To paraphrase Grieve's intro, Proust will show you some wonderful scenes, but before, during and instead of showing, he will tell and tell and tell and fucking tell some more, incl. some of the most obvious and/or boring talking points, Didn't mind in the amazing first volume, but here it can be a chore. But I do think he's left me to infer, right or wrong, that the climatic, rhapsodic odes to Odette as a genius of dress, which I found hard to swallow, given her cheesy tastes in Swann's Way, can be taken as the narrator cheering himself up after the long autopsy of "the slow painful suicide" of his earlier romantic self-image---the self that blew any chance at happiness with Gilberte, whether there really was or could have been one or not.

Although I didn't mind it all that much, mainly compared to Swann's Way: Monsieur P.'s got me spoiled, "cossetted" as Grieve says of him (lots of complaints, but you didn't get drafted, JG).

Also wondering about The Sellout.

Started Jane Rawson's 'From the Wreck', about a shipwrecked Australian man in the 1850s who is haunted for the rest of his life by a transdimensional shapesifting cephalopod, and which is really good.

I find 'The Dead' more moving than I can account for - especially the closing few paragraphs. I can access most of it from memory, and it's like a piece of music in some regards. So much great poetry and poetic truth but the 'falling faintly/faintly falling' is enough to reduce me to tears.

^^^^^

Play with Christopher Walken was good too and they sang at the end.

In other words, ^thirded

What did they sing?

The last sentence of the story, iirc

Agree with Chuck Tatum and others about 'The Dead'!

still reading Johnny Marr: SET THE BOY FREE.
They are making the first LP.

It inspired me to record an instrumental version of 'this charming man' with one take per guitar.

THE BOG OF ALLEN

I find 'The Dead' more moving than I can account for - especially the closing few paragraphs. I can access most of it from memory, and it's like a piece of music in some regards. So much great poetry and poetic truth but the 'falling faintly/faintly falling' is enough to reduce me to tears.

― The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums (Chinaski

The Huston adaptation finds an analog with the music in Angelica Huston's monologue about the delicate boy.

Mark S did you know that one of Flann O'Brien's funniest early writings is a mock play called THE BOG OF ALLEN ?

It stars a character called ALLEN BOG.

I've been reading Malgudi Days, a set of short stories by R. K. Narayan, mostly by the light of an LED headlamp, because we've been out of power for the past 3 days. Just got electricity back about an hour ago. There was a windstorm on Friday.

Did you like it? I'm a big Narayan fan. Downloaded a whole bunch of Malgudi episodes from the Indian 1980s TV series a while back, but have never actually got around to watching them yet.

On book 2 of Wolfhound Empire trilogy, which retains its excellence. People who like Alan Furst or Dave Hutchinson and who can handle a bit of fantasy will like this, i think.

I love Narayan, have a bunch of his stuff. His American tour diary is v interesting.

The first 2/3 of Malgudi Days is excerpted from two early short story collections. These stories all tend to be quite short, about 5 pages each, could more accurately be described as brief tales or vignettes than fully-developed stories. Their interest for me lay chiefly in their capturing some small slice of Indian life drawn almost exclusively from the poor or petty middle class, which a contemporary Indian would have instinctively associated with particular castes, but I am not versed enough in the culture to make such distinctions. The latter third seems to contain longer stories of a dozen of more pages, but I haven't read these, yet.

imo, Narayan's great strength is his ability to capture India's bewildering diversity of people and folkways in extremely simple and convincing microcosms. These stories display that strength. It's like a slide show but in full color and 3-D, full of lively detail.

Should I read Mistry's Such a Long Journey?

Reading a trashy paperback I picked up ages ago: Forbbiden Lovers, about lesbianism during the classic Hollywood era. It's a total mess, making no real distinctions between relationships that have actual documentation backing them up, shady rumor based stuff and stars who happened to have a strong gay following (an interesting topic in its own right, of course). It's padded out with lists of gay women on Broadway and 1920's Paris, and chapters on stuff more unrelated still - Fatty Arbuckle's scandal, for one. Also jumps back and forth in time to a frustrating degree - the "Garbo talks!" moment is mentioned after, like, chapters on her talkie career. Still, the first few chapters, which get very detailed about the love triangle between Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and screenwriter/author Mercedes De Acosta, are written with empathy and avoid trying to make things seem sleazy or lurid - could make for a good episode of You Must Remember This.

and - after months on hold from my library and my forgetting about it until it arrived last week - Chris Kraus' I Love Dick

Interested to hear what you think! I read that recently and found it both fascinating and irritating - reading GoodReads reviews of it made me more puzzled still.

Reading Red Shift by Alan Garner. I wasn't sure at first - too dialogue heavy, too riddled with elisions - but it's grown on me. Kitchen sink landscape mysticism? It might just catch on.

I got the BFI DVD of the TV version of this and it comes with an extra on Garner that makes him seem hyper-pretentious in a not entirely unlikeable way.

Ah yes, I've been meaning to ask: anyone have any particular Mathews recommendations?

There is a thread btw.

i love empson tho i have not read COMPLEX WORDS

COMPLEX WORDS, COM-PLEX WORRDS, CMPLX WRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR-DSAH

I finished Michael Wood's ON EMPSON.

The opening chapter or so is often stunningly interesting and droll. Then it comes and goes a bit. But it's Michael Wood so it's better, and funnier, than almost anyone else would be.

Back to Flann O'Brien's drama - still on his first play Faustus Kelly. Will read the rest also.

remy de gourmont - angels of perversity
mirbeau - the torture garden
cendrars - moravagine
apollinaire - the poet assassinated

had only read some of gourmont's criticism prior to the story collection & wasn't that impressed by it (theophile gautier did that kind of thing better!), still interested in reading the novel of his that arthur ransome translated though.

Jean De Florette, Pagnol. I recently watched, and very much enjoyed, the Yves Robert adaptations of Pagnol's memoirs so I'm happy to dive deeper.

I've now read all the Simenon Maigret novels from 1931 up to 1950, and the absence of any mention of WW2 is quite odd

The way my (German) parents talked about their parent's generation a lot of people just wanted to forget about the era as quickly as possible, perhaps in France as well? (though that doesn't explain lack of mentions in the 30's volumes).

Simenon was accused of collaboration after the war, so maybe he wanted to keep quiet about everything. Also, he didn't publish any Maigrets between '34 and '42, and then only a few for the remainder of the war.

2/3rds of the way through Mason and Dixon

Haven't read it, but I've seen favorable review of Simenon's The Train, about a little guy faced with moral conundrums in Vichy France---maybe also self-justification, like On The Waterfront---?

Reminds me, I recently skimmed NYTimes veteran Alan Riding's And The Show Went On, about Vichy Paris (lots of research, incl. interviews of some who were there, now octo- and nonogenerians): some complex situations etc. of too-visible culture workers, big names and others.

Ive got patrick marnham's simenon bio. Should actually read it. I just need to read these other 20 books by simenon himself first.

^ has his priorities straight

Never get into Simenon myself. What am I missing?

Got

economy of phrase, plot and detail. good at the psychology of ordinary people.

Dirty Snow might be Simenon's WW2 novel - one of his best romans durs. Never read any of his Maigret novels but read plenty of his romans durs and they are excellent, brutal, existentialist works not really very far from Camus's L'Etranger.

Eric Foner - A Short History of Reconstruction

woke up in the night so decided to read something comfortingly easy. Turned to James Wood, THE FUN STUFF and reread essays on Hollinghurst and Orwell.

I finished Angels on Toast, Dawn Powell, last night. It's a strange mix of qualities I have a hard time putting my finger on. The most prominent quality is satire, it is not in a pure form. It is certainly not a comedy, even if it has a few comic moments. It has flashes of wit, but they are not allowed the front of the stage. I'm not sure I'll come to any more solid conclusions about it or about Powell, unless I read several more of her works in close succession.

I haven't decided my next book, but I am eyeballing The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton. I read it originally a couple of decades ago and may revisit it. He is easily the most sympathetic modern Christian author I've encountered.

Yeah, if trying to get into Simenon, go for the non-Maigret stuff. Dirty Snow, Red Lights, Striptease, Three Rooms in Manhattan all good starting places.

Now on Frank Tuohy: The Ice Saints, about a woman trying to get her married-to-a-Pole sister/nephew out of 1960s Poland; low-key, insightful and very good on the dreariness of day-to-day life behind the Iron Curtain.

My favorite Dawn Powell is A Time to Be Born, but I suspect any Powell novel you read first will be a favorite.

I just finished a boring John Tyler bio and finished these things.

I did read The Locusts Have No King about two years ago. Enjoyed it. Not enough to ignite an ardent fandom in me.

Turns out I read it back in 2012.

Reading a battered copy of Huysmans "against nature"

Finished Middlemarch which I loved and happy to note that I made good on my post upthread about revisiting Bolano (Last Evenings on Earth and Distant Star). I hope to turn to The Savage Detectives soon and am also interested in reading Enrique Vila-Matas as well. Has anyone read Bartleby & Co.?

It's really good. Very congenial and clever and bookish.

Seconded

All I remember is finding it enjoyable rather than mind-blowing but I kept it (rather than reading it and moving it on); that's a good sign.

I am reading "All My Puny Sorrows" by Miriam Toews.

I've started The Seven Storey Mountain. It is most definitely the work of a new convert, a young man hugely grateful to have found his vocation in monasticism. He is almost painfully careful to frame his entire life story as a justification of Catholic doctrine and to emphasize the perfect sincerity of his new found faith.

Having read other, later works by Merton, it is interesting to see how much he deepened his approach to spirituality as he passed more decades as a cloistered monk. His abbott must have been a fine man, who understood how Merton differed from most of the monks he oversaw, and who allowed Merton to flourish as a scholar of the contemplative traditions, including Buddhism and Taoism.

Miriam Toews: Her 1st, 3rd, and every odd-numbered book seem to be really good, her even-numbered books all seem to be duds. Very odd.

David M. Friedman - Wilde in America
Colm Toibin - House of Names

How is the Toibin? The reviews make it sound nothing like Brooklyn or Nora Webster.

Based on thr Oresteia!

Thought that was posted on the wrong thread for a second

I could never bring myself to read a Colm Toibin book. They sound so dreary

Ha, me neither. Couldn't even read the one(s) he wrote under a pseudonym.

Oh sorry. Mixing him up with John Banville.

I think this new Toibin will indeed be dreary.

He is not the most exciting writer, in any way.

I started SEVEN TYPES OF AMBIGUITY, after all these years owning it.

I understand why people love eccentric amusing Empson, but so far this book is giving me very little of that. It seems technical in an I.A. Richards sense. I am finding it very dense and not entertaining, not always really comprehensible.

I have an idea that later Empson is easier. I read some of SOME VERSIONS OF PASTORAL years ago - didn't really get it but it does seem less technical.

But I think my big problem with Empson is -- though he offers lots of local insights and fun, I just don't understand his main ideas. His sense of 'pastoral' has never intuitively made any sense to me, and his senses of ambiguity don't seem to click for me either.

Toibin is one of my favorite writers, particularly when he writes short fiction.

Banville is dreary, yeah.

> John Darnielle, Universal Harvester

Kazuo Ishiguro likes it:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jul/08/hot-books-summer-reads-holiday-writers-recommend

Ishiguro OTM.

Terry Pratchett Pyramids
not sure if first 11 pages of this are missing or not. Library copy that I've had out for months and am only just getting around to reading.
Events in the Assassins guild college.

Memoirs of A Geezer Jah Wobble
think I mainly picked this up because of teh p.I.L. connections but am getting interested in his solo stuff, probably should have been already.

The Philosopher's Stone Peter Marshall
picked this up from a sale years ago. Got about 100 pages into it then started reading something else.
Thought I'd give it another shot.
History of the transforming object, starts with an ancient Chinese tomb being opened and the lady inside still being perfectly preserved. he then looks at similar beliefs across the globe and across history ancient to modern going through alchemy etc etc.
Should be really interesting.

Wholly without warrant or authorization, I have initiated a new WAYR thread: Heavens! Look at the Time: What Are You Reading During This Summer of 2017?.

I am hoping ILB will soon occupy it, like a hermit crab seeking a new shell, and adorn it with our usual literate observations.

And for the people who use www.ilxor.com, not those heathens who use just ilxor.com

Heavens! Look at the Time: What Are You Reading During This Summer of 2017?

And for the people who use www.ilxor.com, not those heathens who use just ilxor.com

Heavens! Look at the Time: What Are You Reading During This Summer of 2017?🕸