Winter Is Here and the Time Is Right For A "Whatchoo Reading?" Thread

Good luck, Scott!

Can someone recommend the next Walker Percy novel I should read after The Moviegoer? I've got Love in the Ruins and The Last Gentleman in my library queue.

I have Clock Without Hands, Dow.

Scott S's store is in a nice part of the world! I used to love going to Northampton, MA.

I'm not really planning on reading more ZS after this one, but that's not because I don't like it. It's actually astoundingly good compared to her first novel - astoundingly, miraculously, because 5 years (2000 / 2005), or even more, if you want to push WT back into the 1990s, doesn't seem like enough time to have evolved so much. But she really did.

Then again I'm still only less than 50% through it, having had to stop for other things; quite possibly it goes downhill.

I really want to read WATCHMEN again. It's become a perpetually deferred treat.

The Last Gentleman, Alfred. That and The Moviegoer are the stone classics, all the other novels have some problems. Maybe after those two read some of the non-fiction, like the linguistics essays about Helen Keller. Then maybe the bio Pilgrims In The Ruins.

Robert Walser The Assistant (finally).

Finished Franzen's Strong Motion, out of curiosity, as I've been enjoying his essays. Still unable to shake the DFW thing, so am re-reading Consider the Lobster, while anxiously waiting for my copy of TNY to arrive in the post, any day now, but who knows how long it takes to get to Melbourne. Also looking at John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, as well as Schopenhauer's Essays and Aphorisms, which are a hoot "A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten."

I bought some good (i hope) books last weekend;
Inimitable Jeeves - Wodehouse
A time of gifts - Patrick Leigh Fermour
Les Grand Meaulnes - Alain-Fournier
The Boat - Nam Le

think i'll read the wodehouse first. Haven't read anything funny in a good while

If you need light-hearted comedy, avoid 'The Boat'. It's a great collection, but the opening story has pretty gut-churning My Lai massacre descriptions.

Recently or now read(ing)....

John Bowen: The Birdcage
Clare Wigfall: The Loudest Sound and Nothing
Eli Gottlieb: Now You See Him (a weirdly typeset book, full of kerning errors, so that every page has a least half-a-dozen sentences with wei rd gap s li ke thi s. Ve ry distr acting.

xyzzzz__, could you to persuade the library to order a copy of The Station Hill Blanchot Reader? A lot (most?) of his fiction is in there, including Death Sentence, along with a bit of criticism (The other Blanchot Reader, the one from Blackwell, is better for the criticism, which I like better than the fiction, tbh, tho' Death Sentence is intense) and it's pretty reasonably priced for a comprehensive selection (this might be bit skewed in my memory - there were a lot of remainder copies on Amazon uk when I bought it).
(Oh, and, yes, congratulations & good luck Scott! I may never be in your part of America, but if I am, will be sure to smash my baggage allowance via your shop)

I will get them on it.

After all I got them to buy a Jean Ricardou book, no reason why they couldn't get me some Blanchot.

read colson whitehead's "sag harbor" over the weekend and started "a confederacy of dunces". i'm still halfway through "the devil in the white city"...i enjoy it when i'm reading it but it never entices me to pick it up.

how is the whitehead? and how come you have a copy already, huh?

Thansk for the recommendation, James. The Last Gentleman is a drag so far, though: lots – too much – dialogue.

Looking forward to reading Scott's recommendations, but until that moment, I've just picked up 1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare by James Shapiro. Bonus points for astutely imaginative reconstructions of the Elizabethan world, and also for practical interpretations of the plays according to context.

Minus points for rather odd lapses, such as when he puts down lapses in stage directions to Shakespeare's psychology rather than transcribers or setters. Also, I never feel ENTIRELY comfortable with these sorts of imaginative reconstructions, good though this one undoubtedly is, preferring lotsa footnotes and scholarly structures. My bad I think, this.

Also picked up Afternoon Men by Anthony Powell again. It was hanging round my grilfiend's (as I had bought it for her). Very funny with the feeling of melancholy that characterizes his early comic stuff, pretty much of all of which is brilliant.

Just starting Underworld by DeLillo.

Collected Essays by Graham Greene. Wasn't expecting it to be almost all book reviews, which makes it a bit monotonous at times. And he's sort of almost too reasonable at times - so many essays go "well, this guy has this and this and this going for him, but he is really bad at this" (tendency to end on the negative rather than the positive, too.) But I'm still having a good time, hard to dislike Greene.

bouncing back and forth between The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 and Paddy Whacked - T.J. English, about irish gangsters. Getting my true crime itch scratched i guess.

Anthony Powell's pre-Dance comic novels are wonderful.
I love the Graham Greene essay on Beatrix Potter (and if you can find 'Mornings in the Dark', his collected film writing, it's great too).

Reading/read...

Andre Malraux: The Way of the Kings
Colette: The Pure and the Impure

how is the whitehead? and how come you have a copy already, huh?

― thomp, Wednesday, March 11, 2009 12:18 PM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i'm connected, yo. :D

i revived this thread for it, but i really enjoyed it. i think it's very direct and earnest for him, but i've only read 'the intuitionist' so maybe it's not as atypical as i think.

"Just starting Underworld by DeLillo."

fantastic book! middle dragged a bit but well worth reading. i loved it.

finished dr jekyll and mr hyde which i enjoyed immensely. ollala (?) was a good story as well. now off to read another cornwell book. the body farm.

John Stewart Collis: The Worm Forgives the Plough

I seem to have lost my copy of L.A. Confidential.

In my grief I wandered into the Half Price and picked up Lethem's Amnesia Moon & something called Thinks... by David Lodge.

JM, what is that?

Alimosina: Collis worked on an English farm during WW2, and it's a collection of his observations on nature, the land, etc--actually 2 books together, the second of which is especially good at communicating the amazing-ness of everyday natural life viewed with a fresh eye.

riding toward everywhere by william t. vollman

Finally finished Madame Bovary and appreciated it much more than I thought I would. It seemed ridiculously modern and written much later than it was, and although much of that may have been the effect of the translator it's still hard to believe it was written so long before Freud, etc.

Just started The Rape of Nanking. The preface alone has me utterly depressed. Should be fun!

I'm also reading an Agatha Christie (the ABC Murders) which I read back in high school but whose plot & solution I've forgotten so it doesn't feel like a re-read.

I'm a little giddy.

Just got a copy of Oscar Casares's first novel Amigoland. His short story collection, Brownsville, is one of the best collections I've ever read. As Ice Cube would say, today was a good day.

Greene's Collected Essays incl re-evaluating his early discoveries of books, and excavating/salvaging works from deep in British literature (obscure to me anyway)going with passing references to world going down tubes in 30s, so urge to rescue/counterbalance seems subtly evident, but yeah, he doesn't hesitate to go negative, and my copy indicates that Beatrix Potter was not amused by his celebration. Pinefox, have you read yr copy of Clock Without Hands, and if so, what did you think?

I can't remember if it's Collected Essays or Mornings in the Dark that has Greene's great movie review where he basically accused Shirley Temple's movie producers as using her as paedophile-bait, and got sued for it.

I just finished Sam Taylor's 'The Island at the End of the World', and while I can't really recommend it to anyone, I really want someone else to read it so I can have someone to moan to about the massive multiple gaping logic holes in it. Nice cover, though:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/P/0571240518.01._SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Just read Gabriel Josipovici's essay review on Volume 1 of Beckett's letters. Josipovici can go repetitively fuck heself with a long eclectic thing of doubtful provenance,(nothing to do with the review - just general dislike) but the letters sound great.

In the TLS I meant to say.

Katherine Mansfield: Letters & Journals -- a very interesting selection, but not very helpfully edited (obscure references and persons remain unexplained throughout)

James, thanks for the advice! Lack of movie related writing was my main disappointment wrt this anthology. Did end up enjoying it immensley though, especially the stuff about popes and priests (don't often read actively catholic writers, I guess, was nice to get a small window into that world.)

going with passing references to world going down tubes in 30s

Haha yeah dow, that next to last essay written in 1940 where he talks about how people are saying that man gets used to anything and he's like "well, NO, we just get used to THIS stuff because we knew it was gonna happen anyway, it was inevitable"? Wow. I'd love to know where - if at all - that was actually published, not exactly a call to buy war bonds.

Now reading Yukio Mishima's Temple Of The Golden Pavillion

Perhaps the time has come to make the seasonal change of digs for this thread. You know, spring cleaning and all that jazz. Since I screwed up the thread title last time with a fistful of those &apos doohickeys, maybe someone else might care to do the honors this time. Øystein? Jaq? Scott?

Done: Spring in the NORTH, Autumn in the SOUTH, it matters not, what are you READING?