The PORTRAITS and LANDSCAPES collections are full of lovely things.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Wednesday, 27 May 2020 22:16 (three years ago) link
currently reading The Corner That Held Them (NYRB). occasionally extremely funny, but mostly a bit of a slog.
i meant to read 30 books this year. i've read 37 so far. lol pandemic.
the ones i liked:
distant mirror: the calamitous 14 century by barbara tuchman. what a world!
this america: the case for the nation by jill lepore (long essay that i guess was cut from her "these truths" single volume history of the united states). makes a "Liberal" tactical case for redefining and promoting "nationalism" quite well. these truths is better IMO.
a single man by isherwood. very good on the british experience of los angeles. who else does that? geoff dyer?
say nothing: true history of murder in northern ireland by patrick radden keefe. mixture of an unsolved murder podcast (gross) and a good introductory history of the IRA for an american audience.
dept of speculation by jenny offil. i loved reading this but i can't remember much about it.
before the storm: barry goldwater and the unmaking of the american consensus by rick perlstein. not quite as interesting as nixonland, but i'm reading all his stuff in preparation for reaganland.
cities of the plain by cormac mccarthy. the best of the trilogy IMO. magical ending.
the spy and the traitor by ben macintyre. oleg gordievsky's exfiltration story. i posted about it on the TTSS thread.
uncanny valley by anna weiner. very smart look at silicon valley. as everyone has said, the indirect references to companies ("the social network everyone hates", etc). are maddening.
remains of the day. i also read never let me go and much preferred remains.
crudo by olivia laing.
west by carys davies
the most infuriating books i have read this year so far are wuthering heights (eastenders but everyone has TB) and light in august (just awful prose). i guess they're "better" than some of the books i liked but i hated reading them so ยฏ\_(ใ)_/ยฏ
― ๐ ๐๐ข๐จ (caek), Wednesday, 27 May 2020 22:56 (three years ago) link
you finished 25 books you didn't like???
― silby, Thursday, 28 May 2020 03:13 (three years ago) link
s/the ones i liked:/the ones i rated highest.
i kind of regret finishing light in august and wuthering heights but the other books were all fine and worth reading and even worth recommending.
i didn't keep track of which ones i quit. probably about 5? most of those were terrible award winning scifi that was actually YA trash.
― ๐ ๐๐ข๐จ (caek), Thursday, 28 May 2020 04:18 (three years ago) link
Lol Wuthering Heights sounds really appealing.
― xyzzzz__, Thursday, 28 May 2020 08:20 (three years ago) link
Started on David Roach's Masters Of British Comic Art
― Daniel_Rf, Thursday, 28 May 2020 09:56 (three years ago) link
shiiit there's a reaganland coming?
― the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Thursday, 28 May 2020 13:10 (three years ago) link
Yup, out in Augusthttps://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/rick-perlstein/reaganland/
― ๐ ๐๐ข๐จ (caek), Thursday, 28 May 2020 15:36 (three years ago) link
It looks long!
Today's REAGANLAND tidbit is a special video addition. pic.twitter.com/bnf4NHSeDh— Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein) May 28, 2020
― ๐ ๐๐ข๐จ (caek), Thursday, 28 May 2020 17:32 (three years ago) link
I finished A Coffin for Dimitrios and for a light entertainment it was quite good. I would say that Eric Ambler went just a bit overboard in portraying the character of Mr. Peters as tendentious and tedious, to the point where he overshot the mark of simply indicating these traits so that Peters' several monologues were often so genuinely tedious and I was tempted to skip past them and miss the vital bits embedded in them. Otherwise, I applaud the book.
― A is for (Aimless), Thursday, 28 May 2020 18:40 (three years ago) link
wuthering heights kicks ass
― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Thursday, 28 May 2020 18:47 (three years ago) link
man given the size of that thing (reaganland) already Iโm glad itโs not a hardback. i never read his third , wonder if I have time to get to that one before the new one is out
― the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Thursday, 28 May 2020 23:14 (three years ago) link
those are probably review copies. The retail version on amazon for pre order is hardback.
― ๐ ๐๐ข๐จ (caek), Friday, 29 May 2020 00:17 (three years ago) link
Wuthering Heights is an epic poem of hate. There's nothing like in prose or poetry in English lit.
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 29 May 2020 00:22 (three years ago) link
*like it.
And "hate" and "love" come from the same place.
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 29 May 2020 00:23 (three years ago) link
/Wuthering Heights/ is an epic poem of hate. There's nothing like in prose or poetry in English lit.
― ๐ ๐๐ข๐จ (caek), Friday, 29 May 2020 00:25 (three years ago) link
I've still never read any Faulkner. I guess I should do something about that before I get too old to care. I'm currently reading Submission by Michel Houellebecq. I've only read Elementary Particles before this. Kinda feels like he's coasting.
― o. nate, Friday, 29 May 2020 01:20 (three years ago) link
I'm now reading The Crock of Gold, James Stephens. This is an entertaining oddity from pre-WWI and the Celtic Revival. It's a long comic-philosophic fable, featuring leprechauns, fairies, the God Pan, a Philosopher, and a Thin Woman. It was popular enough to be reprinted often, but seems mostly forgotten now. I won't attempt to describe it.
― A is for (Aimless), Friday, 29 May 2020 15:32 (three years ago) link
Jonathan Swift - Tha Major WorksVictor Serge - Memoirs of a Revolutionary
Swift's Major works compilation are exhaustive in terms of the range of material -- poetry, correspondence to several pamphlets and 'A Tale of a Tub', all thoroughly annotated -- not a lot more to add to what I said TS Heavy Hitters: Powerhouses of Prose (knife-drawer edition): Jonathan Swift vs Mark Twain"">in this thread except I saved A Modest Proposal as one of the final pieces and it really has a bite, as the rich still eat us for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
And so onto Serge's recollections of life as a militant, looking back to struggles fought in mainland Europe to his years in Russia (among Trotsky's Left Opposition), then his expulsion back to France and finally into Mexico just as the Nazis were hitting town. One aspect that is pretty much unique to this book is paragraph after paragraph that starts as a recollection of a person, their physical and psychological characteristics with a dashed narrative of their encounter, all ending with a "they died in a camp/committed suicide/were shot/disappeared/I don't know what happened to them/this almost certainly happened to them". Just pages of the stuff. As the last chapter says (almost as an apology) it was written on the run (he was almost always on the run), it shows and yet circumstances combine here in a really unique manner. Its almost a thriller (via Bolano's 2666)! The positive note at the end is something else. I may need to re-read, just to make sure I wasn't dreaming it.
― xyzzzz__, Friday, 29 May 2020 19:01 (three years ago) link
The Case of Comrade Tulayev impressed the hell out of me last fall.
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 29 May 2020 19:09 (three years ago) link
xxpost o.nate, if you ever do try Faulkner, maybe start with The Portable Faulkner: well-chosen set pieces from novels, along with many whole shorter things, in chronological order of the stories' settings, from early 1800s to 1950s. Chunky but handy, and certainly portable. (Also has some of the author's maps of where his characters live.)
― dow, Friday, 29 May 2020 19:12 (three years ago) link
Tulayev was written (or finished in Mexico) and I forgot to say that so much of the material in that novel obviosuly makes its way in The Memoirs..., a very good counterpart.
I've had my ups and downs with Faulkner - Light in August was tough but I reckon it wasn't my time for that...it did put me off him for years till I picked As I lay Dying last year so want to try Absalom, Absalom next.
― xyzzzz__, Friday, 29 May 2020 19:35 (three years ago) link
I'd recommend Light in August or the interconnected story collection Go Down, Moses as a starting point, or even a straightforward narrative like The Unvanquished if you're feeling less frisky.
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 29 May 2020 19:40 (three years ago) link
light in august was also where i was told to start fwiw. it certainly was *very* faulknery in the sense i understand the term.
― ๐ ๐๐ข๐จ (caek), Friday, 29 May 2020 19:45 (three years ago) link
The time shifts aren't disorienting for tyros like in TS&TF and Absalom, Absalom though.
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 29 May 2020 19:45 (three years ago) link
my first attempt was the sound & the fury, which was suboptimal
― mookieproof, Friday, 29 May 2020 21:21 (three years ago) link
Finally could not withhold The Mirror and the Light from myself any longer and dove in. Iโm as intoxicated as ever. Hook line sinker etc.
― silby, Friday, 29 May 2020 21:46 (three years ago) link
IMPOSTURES by al แธคarรฎri, translated by Michael Cooperson-- Absolutely astonishing book--850 years old, collection of 50 stories about a wandering conman all written with various proto-Oulipan constraints (palindromes, anagrams, lipograms, etc), each of the 50 translated by Cooperson in a different way (Australian English, Singlish, Nigerian English, Patwa, Virgina Woolf, Jonathan Swift, Joyce, Kempe, Aphra Behn, etc etc) which is thematically suggested by the story.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Saturday, 30 May 2020 01:05 (three years ago) link
Sold.
― silby, Saturday, 30 May 2020 01:37 (three years ago) link
That sounds interesting.
I ought to try THE CROCK OF GOLD one day.
Only 80pp or so to go in LOOK AT ME. A lot goes on in this novel.
― the pinefox, Saturday, 30 May 2020 08:36 (three years ago) link
I read O Pioneers! by Willa Cather. It's so perfectly edited - like an epic novel hiding in a slim volume (a bit like JL Carr's A Month in the Country). I liked it very much.
Now, in an absurd switch up, I'm reading Hyperion by Dan Simmons. I've not read any epic science fiction in for a good long while and am acutely aware of the politics of it and how much it feels like a big kid wanking over his drawings of inter-galactic genocide.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Saturday, 30 May 2020 16:20 (three years ago) link
Like what others have said, As I Lay Dying seems like a decent place to start with Faulkner.
― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Saturday, 30 May 2020 16:21 (three years ago) link
More than decent, it's one of his best, among those that I've read, with the balance of clarity and chance-taking narrative structure. Also could start with The Hamlet(my gateway), "The Bear," or "Old Man," with psychedelic special SFX which are historically appropriate, re the Great Flood of 1927. Yeah, xp Go Down Moses too.
― dow, Saturday, 30 May 2020 18:15 (three years ago) link
Will keep promoting Cather over Hemingway as the American writer whom young male wannabes should emulate.
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 30 May 2020 18:22 (three years ago) link
I'm pretty sure Hemingway's idol has been demoted to a decorative curiosity among the deities of young male wannabes. lord knows who they're all imitating these days, but I don't think Papa is in the running.
― A is for (Aimless), Saturday, 30 May 2020 18:27 (three years ago) link
+1 for As I Lay Dying as a good entry point for Faulkner: it's not very long, the use of multiple points of view is classic, and the horror and comedy of rural poverty are turned up to 11
Absalom, Absalom! is better but denser and full of those half-page-long sentences that exhaust the patience of many readers
long ago I was a research drone for a professor preparing an annotated edition of Light in August and I remember he had a note explaining that
I have come from Alabama: a fur piece.
― Brad C., Saturday, 30 May 2020 18:57 (three years ago) link
All the good recommendations for Faulkner have been noted - maybe starting with stories would be less intimidating for me. I finished Submission. It got better by the end, though still a bit patchy. I was impressed by the way Houellebecq was able to find a way to interweave his usual preoccupations (male status anxiety, lust, contempt for liberals, misogyny) into something topical and politically au courant. The parts where he attempts something like a traditional political thriller I think are the least successful. He's on firmer ground when he's in his ruminative anthropological mode, jumping smoothly from literary history to philosophy, gourmandise, and the taxonomy of social status.
― o. nate, Saturday, 30 May 2020 21:16 (three years ago) link
wait so is that good or bad
― Chuck_Tatum, Sunday, 31 May 2020 01:18 (three years ago) link
โ A is for (Aimless)
Not true in creative writing depts
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Sunday, 31 May 2020 03:07 (three years ago) link
Christ on a cracker! do creative writing students still use typewriters w/ carbon paper, too?
― A is for (Aimless), Sunday, 31 May 2020 04:10 (three years ago) link
My impression is that most of the Hemingwayism in creative writing departments is fourth-hand.
― the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Sunday, 31 May 2020 05:06 (three years ago) link
I've been reading Richard Ford's The Sportswriter and dear lord it is insufferable.
― the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Sunday, 31 May 2020 05:09 (three years ago) link
I took a break to read Mike Royko's Boss, an account of Richard Daley's life running up to the Democratic Convention and the shooting of Fred Hampton, and it was ... refreshing
― the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Sunday, 31 May 2020 05:10 (three years ago) link
Though getting to the section on the riots after MLK Jr's death did bring on a feeling of dread.
― the ghost of tom, choad (thomp), Sunday, 31 May 2020 05:11 (three years ago) link
According to this thread I started Jennifer Egan's LOOK AT ME in early April. I finished it today - about 517pp. Not a good speed. A long novel; engaging, sometimes well written and alert; perhaps somehow a little youthful in its interest in fashion models, NYC nightclubs, teenagers, even a private detective (I wonder very slightly if Egan introduced the detective because she was impressed by Lethem's, which she definitely was in 1999 - but this book was probably planned well before that).
The novel runs two or three parallel threads and somewhat unites them by the end. It includes a kind of premonition of social media or rather of 'influencers' or whatever people on YouTube do nowadays. (An evident link with the last chapter of GOON SQUAD which was speculative fiction about social media influence.) Such premonitions are usually, I suppose, a hostage to fortune, but here how much the premonition, written in the late 1990s, gets right is more interesting than what it doesn't.
There is a great deal of DeLillo here - New York; ideas of image and simulation; and especially, a terrorist who wants to destroy 'the conspiracy' of America. But the writing isn't much like DeLillo - it's warmer and more down to earth. At moments, to my surprise, the humour can even approach the zing of Lorrie Moore.
Overall I think it's creditable.
― the pinefox, Sunday, 31 May 2020 15:04 (three years ago) link
I finished The Crock of Gold last night. It has many fine moments, but the author had a tendency to take off about once every 50 pages into a page or two of high-flown nonsense masquerading as ecstatic wisdom. When it managed to stay closer to the ground it was often quite clever in a pleasant way. Be warned: it contains much confusion about the 'true' natures of men and women, as if people were archetypes, and not human.
― A is for (Aimless), Monday, 1 June 2020 16:39 (three years ago) link
I read another delight of a Pym novel, The Sweet Dove Died. Not as sharp as the last, but I relished the portrait of a young gay man on the make (about whom she's quite explicit in showing him in sexual scenarios).
― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 1 June 2020 16:42 (three years ago) link
I just finished the quiet american. Very good!
― ๐ ๐๐ข๐จ (caek), Tuesday, 2 June 2020 00:00 (three years ago) link
Finished Egan's short story collection, Emerald City - also lots of stories about models and kids and gap year holidays. Kind of middle-of-the-road but lots of incidental pleasures. I still think Manhattan Beach is her best book by a long distance.
I picked up some Pym's to support my local bookstore: Glass of Blessings, Less Than Angels, Jane & Prudence, and Quartet in Autumn, plus another Dumas telephone book translated by Robin Buss, The Women's War.
Also just finished The Secret Commonwealth - it's probably Pullman's sloppiest book, with a lot of generic blockbuster writing and no visible editing, but very enjoyable - it's a lot more fun than "Amber Spyglass".
― Chuck_Tatum, Tuesday, 2 June 2020 15:09 (three years ago) link
Ford seems pretty insufferable himself
― Chuck_Tatum, Tuesday, 2 June 2020 15:12 (three years ago) link