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

I read "Three Light-Years" by Andrea Canobbio, which is a mildly diverting tale of a relationship, I enjoyed it well enough but it's going straight back on the free book exchange thing from whence it came. It's on MacLehose, and I've generally been extremely pleased with romance-y books on his imprints, "Con Brio" by Brian Svit comes to mind -I loved that one; this one didn't meet my high hopes. "Italo Calvino meets Paul Auster", said Boyd Tonkin, according to the cover. Tonkin.

I am reading "All The Devils Are Here" by David Seabrook, Backlisted podcast favourite fwiw, this one is living up to its billing, spooked (nearly) non-fictional tales of Kentish sleaze and loathing (possibly sleaze and loathing of Kent, I can never remember how that sides-of-the-Medway thing works). Charles Hawtrey and Lord Haw-Haw, cor.

I finished "A Month in the Country". It's a quite enjoyable book. Often nothing much seems to be happening plot-wise, but by the end, I was admiring how seamlessly it hangs together, even though plot is not really the main interest. It's more of a poetic reverie on youth, innocence, and simpler times, with a current of melancholy running through it. My only complaint is that at times the WWI backstory seems called on to provide more in the way of pathos and empathy for the main character than the author really earns. Not that I'd have wanted the author to flesh that out more - it would have changed the focus of the book - but maybe it could have been downplayed a bit, or leavened with a bit of sardonic wit, or something. Anyway, that's just a minor quibble.

i felt like the slow pace gave it a strange combination of realism mixed with human emotion. i never felt that way about the war stuff, but that's just my take on it, the sparseness and almost vague sense of the main character was a sort of strength for me, it really is just one month of this life, but there's a sense of a longer story never told that i like. i guess like many here i consider this book almost perfect, so my view is prob irrational :)

I finished The Post Office Girl, Stefan Zweig. It is an excellent book and I don't want my criticisms of its imperfections to obscure that fact. It is class conscious, as befits a 1930s novel, and its critique of capitalism and class are deft, compact and hard-hitting, without making any of its characters into cardboard villains. The people act as people are wont to act, from understandable motives. The psychology is usually well-observed and quite sound.

Only two really incongruous elements obtruded themselves as I read it. One was the head-spinningly swift transformations Zweig imposes on his title character, which may be convenient for the plot and moderately plausible when each one is considered in isolation from the others, but occur in such rapid fire succession they at last become hard to swallow. The second was the dismaying sexism Zweig displays in the second part of the book, which would have seemed harmless and natural to his contemporary audience, but grates on today's sensibilities.

The final ten pages give Zweig a chance to be clever and demonstrate his ability to plan a 'perfect' crime, but they were fun to read anyway and fitted snugly into the story, so it wasn't purely an exercise in showing off.

Suspect, from reading other Zweig, that those sudden-change infelicities might have been ironed out in a final draft

Love "Three Man In A Boat", particularly the bit where he contrasts his own relationship to cats with that of his dog. Still need to read the sequel.

Sequel is fun, if not as good: also full of prescient stuff about germany, along the lines of 'if these weirdly efficient people ever get militaristic we'll all be in trouble'

I am reading "Wayward Heroes" by Halldor Laxness, his go at Norse saga business. I am a sucker for this kind of thing.

plus many Margaret Millars

― Mince Pramthwart (James Morrison), Wednesday, June 14, 2017 11:03 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I grabbed a small pile of these a few years back but haven't read any of them yet. Any in particular you'd recommend?

Beast in View is her best-known and is great, the Tom Aragon novels and Fire Will Freeze are very funny. Any of the books from the 1960s and 1970s are likely to be wonderful, from what I've read so far.

Been thinking for a while of buying book of her husband's correspondence with Eudora Welty.

Bought book of Eudora Welty/William Maxwell letters instead.

Beast in View is in the pile. Will start there. Thanks!!

David Lodge, THE YEAR OF HENRY JAMES: astoundingly myopic self-importance and lack of perspective - embarrassing - an inadvertent comic novella.

Jonathan Lethem, HOW WE GOT INSIPID: two stories from his Fantastic 1990s - the second an odd combo of detective story and Surrealist art

Michael Wood, ON WILLIAM EMPSON: so far, often hilarious; MW back on form after the last book of his I read that slightly disappointed me (oh yes, it was his Hitchcock)

I got off the David Lodge train around the time of Nice Work, although I did go see him do an instore at Books & Co for Paradise News. Still curious about his H.G. Wells book. Feel like linked to a funny review of that James book which mentioned someone "stealing his Groucho's card."

I got off the David Lodge train around the time of Nice Work

same here, although a grad school professor assigned Paradise News for a class set in London.

Oh – I discovered Mary Renault! I'm almost finished with The Persian Boy, which I've gobbled.

'I FALL upon the spines of books! I read!' -- Autumn 2014: What Are You Reading?

^contains link to review by and pull quote from Terry Eagleton to which I was just referring

I am reading "Wayward Heroes" by Halldor Laxness, his go at Norse saga business. I am a sucker for this kind of thing.

be interested to hear how this is.

A fifth of the way through it's brilliant but I'll let you know.

the sparseness and almost vague sense of the main character was a sort of strength for me

I think it worked beautifully for the most part, ie. the quickly sketched-in backstory, but something about doing that with his war experience seemed a bit off to me, but it might have been just the mood I was in at the time. Anyway, I'm now reading Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves, which will presumably sketch in a war experience with a lot more detail.

Haven't read that one, but some veterans have mentioned the sparseness and almost vague sense of battlefield experience, maybe the mind's defensive deprivation--- with the registration of certain things, some very relevant, some random, but filtered---can be actual smoke, fog, and/or dust, but the same effect can be in broad daylight. Can start, that is.

While on a brief camping vacation I read Graham Greene's early novel Stamboul Train. After reading the Zweig novel, it was surprisingly shallow and, for want of a better word, garish, in comparison. But comparisons are odious, as we all know, so had I not read the Zweig I could say with confidence that Stamboul Train is a readable and modestly entertaining novel, but nothing to cross the street for.

In addition, while camping I cracked open my used copy of the Penguin Classics edition of R. J. Hollingdale's translation of Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra and read the translator's very fine and perceptive Introduction to the book, which was so perceptive and convincing in its insights into Nietzsche's oeuvre and Zarathustra's place within it that it immediately convinced me that I wanted nothing whatsoever to so with reading that book or anything further by Herr Nietzsche. I plan to give away my copy to a charity shop.

Finally, this morning, sitting by a clear rushing river of snowmelt water from the Cascades Range, I dipped into an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson on 'Solitude and Sociability' and my god that man could string together the most self-assured series of assertions about What Is Most True About Life, with the fewest references to solid fact or fig leafs of qualification or doubts, than any writer I can recall reading, because I have mercifully forgotten every word by Ayn Rand I ever read. You are forced either to wag your head in endless imbecilic agreement with his every sentence or else hurl him across the room in a fit of rage.

xp What if someone buys it from the charity shop and is thereby persuaded that charity is slave morality?

tra-la-la-la-la and fiddle-dee-dee! they are welcome to their brilliant nihilist superhumanity and much good may it do them. but, by and large, R.J. Hollingdale convinced me that Nietzsche merely backtracked in the end to a sort of egoistic maniac's version of Lutheranism (<-- my words, not his.)

Reading Don Paterson, 40 SONNETS which Stevie T of ILB fame gave me. Nearly halfway through. I didn't think I liked Paterson as a persona - macho? tough? sarcastic? - but apart from craftsmanship, this volume has a certain quality of ... the phrase is probably 'unflinching honesty' - it tends to look into the abyss, is challenging about bleak existential outlooks, rather than engaging in false uplift. And there's a pretty good generic sonnet in honour of a dead person, something you could read aloud at a funeral. Quite a few quite striking little poems.

Also a poem addressed to Tony Blair which turns out to be an attack on him for familiar post-Iraq reasons.

Because I have not finished any of the books so far listed, I have now started THE DAMNED UNITED by David Peace. It is about football apparently.

True enough, although I believe it can be enjoyed without extensive knowledge of (English) Premier League etc.

I loved it and (because?) I know nothing about football

i want to read it - i am trying to write some fiction about football at the moment so also reading this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Living-Volcano-Secrets-Surviving-Football/dp/1780893272

some pretty harrowing stuff - if anything it highlights what a wilderness these managers are in, they are essentially clueless and unqualified, the vast majority of them, wading through a complex and multifaceted job with for which they have only paltry training and precious little skill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgXunbW4h9Q

actually remember this^^^ as a kid (not the match lol, but bremner's shirt-strip tantrum as he left the field) (haha also the commentary, a vanished world)

They always mention David Peace hails from Dewsbury in interviews etc. He is from Ossett which is a whole different culture from Dewsbury, there are only a few miles separating them but they are quite far apart in other ways. You won't find the calm, genteel atmosphere of Ossett's Gawthorpe estate anywhere in Chickenley, The Moor or Thornhill! Although there did used to be a book shop in Dewsbury run by a Chinese lady who told my partner David Peace's dad was a regular customer.

Hi Aimless, I suspect Greene might agree with you---in one of his memoirs, he says he was so unhappy with the early crap he was turning out that he tried to crawl back to a journo job he'd blown off---his editors had pointed out to him that there were other novelists on staff, that it was possible to do both. Was trying to figure out his first good book; the earliest I've read is Brighton Rock, but it's from '38, not terribly early for him. Might be this one, written in the early 30s, published in 1974:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/20/specials/greene-monkey.html

He even suppressed his 2nd and 3rd novels--they've not been reprinted in decades.

Reading MALAFRENA by Ursula Le Guin: 19th-Century writer revolutionaries in an imaginary country vs the Austrian govt. It's enjoyable and well-written, it's just that given there are a number of very good books about such revolutionaries in ACTUAL existing Central European countries written by actual Central European writers, it all feels a little ersatz and unnecessary. Good fun, though.

I recently finished & enjoyed TOUCH by Courtney Maum and THE SARAH BOOK by Scott McClanahan.

On Saturday, I finished The Persian Boy, my first Mary Renault. I'm hooked.

Mary Renault writes historical romances with the emphasis on the second word. If you want to understand Alexander, read Peter Green's Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 B.C..

well, yeah, I'm reading a historical fiction -- I know what I'm getting into (although what criticism I've read since I finished it suggests she was fairly accurate).

and I don't want to understand Alexander, actually!

thanks for the recommendation, though. I don't read enough historical fiction. I'll probably start Mantel soon.

Alexander is worth understanding, not so much because he is crazy different from all other conquering leaders, but because he is such a perfect specimen who can be studied in some detail as the pure example of his type. Understand him well and you instantly open a window onto large chunks of human history, both before and after.

Memoirs of A Geezer by Jah Wobble. Just got as far as Jeanette Lee joining P.I.L.
Quite enjoyable so far.
Makes me regret not buying a bass a few years ago when i was thinking of doing so.

Finished Art Sex Music by Cosey Fanni Tutti this morning.
God Genesis P Orridge comes off asa hateful arsehole from that.
& I now want to go and check out more of Carter and tutti or whatever name they worked under's work.
Also wondering if the Temple of Psychic Youth's location remained the same until it left London. Cops i got taken down there in the late 80s. But not sure if that is the Beck rd premises.

aimless wrong as usual

^ you almost baited me into responding seriously to that troll.

The best way to understand history is to read novels anyway.

Ditched Henderson the Rain King and am reading Remajns of the Day. I'm kind of cynical of the cohort that came out of Malcolm Bradbury's UEA course, inasmuch as there's a voice I associate with it: immaculate, mannered, a little bloodless. Ishiguro seems to be the apotheosis of this - and Remains is riddled with a kind of structural neurosis that almost swamps the already neurotic narrative voice. It's fascinating to watch Stevens' fear of being though, and how the affect sort of seeps out, gradually accumulating in the margins.

xp How do the people who write those novels acquire their understanding of history then? By reading other novels?

Obviously! But your initial post sounded as if you were tut-tutting me for reading a novel about a historical personage; I said I don't read fiction to "understand" real people.

(I'm reminded ofWilde's remark about memoirs being the best novels)

EP Thompson - William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary

bedside reading: Raymond Carver - Collected Stories