"And sport no more seen / On the darkening green" -- What are you reading SPRING 2020?

Sold.

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.

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.

Like what others have said, As I Lay Dying seems like a decent place to start with Faulkner.

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.

Will keep promoting Cather over Hemingway as the American writer whom young male wannabes should emulate.

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.

+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.

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.

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.

wait so is that good or bad

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)

Not true in creative writing depts

Christ on a cracker! do creative writing students still use typewriters w/ carbon paper, too?

My impression is that most of the Hemingwayism in creative writing departments is fourth-hand.

I've been reading Richard Ford's The Sportswriter and dear lord it is insufferable.

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

Though getting to the section on the riots after MLK Jr's death did bring on a feeling of dread.

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.

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.

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).

I just finished the quiet american. Very good!

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".

Ford seems pretty insufferable himself

Just before bed on Sunday, I cracked open the new translation of Michael Kohlhaas that New Directions brought out this year, which has become unexpectedly timely.

I don't have my copy of the Penguin Kleist volume handy to compare the translations, but there were several baffling choices just in the first few pages (including a confusing mixing of direct speech in quotation marks and narrated speech without quotes in the span of a single paragraph). No introduction or other editorial content, so no way to know whether there was, e.g., a deliberate choice to use awkward English in places for faithfulness to un-idiomatic German... These are just minor annoyances, they don't detract much from such an obviously great work, and I look forward to flying through the remaining ~100 pages once my boss stops asking me to work late.

Read some nice pieces on Kleist as a result of that new volume even though I'm not getting it (v happy with the edition on Archipelago)

Started Arthur & George, Julian Barnes last night. Seems OK so far, but slightly bland.

Kleist's short stories are great great stuff. Dude was seriously deranged, tho it doesn't seem to show much in his fiction iirc.

Now reading "Lost Property: Memoirs and Confessions of a Bad Boy" by Ben Sonnenberg.

Arthur & George has picked up steam, and the story has grown compelling enough to keep me reading ahead, but there's something about the mannerisms of it that I don't enjoy that I have not yet put my finger on.

My Father and Myself - JR Ackerley. Stunning, can't recommend this one too highly. Fantastic on what it was like to be gay in Edwardian London, on trench warfare in WW1, and above all an intriguing detective story about the author's father and his double life.

All Ackerley is excellent

something about the mannerisms of it that I don't enjoy that I have not yet put my finger on

all Barnes is this for me

Side question - can anyone recommend a good 2ndhand online bookshop in the Uk that’s not amazon?

I just use bookfinder.com and then go straight to the vendor if I can.

Got quite a few through hive.co.uk

Chuck, yes I can: Undercover Books.

http://undercoverbooks.co.uk/

If you make contact directly they should be very responsive. Good people.

Thank you!

I went to Undercover Books last year. Fantastic stock - prices on the high side.

That's really interesting to hear, WF. Didn't know that about the prices - it's all relative of course ... I know that like many places, they have a lot of much more valuable stock that's online only.

But I love browsing the stock and I'm keen to support that business, especially during this period, so I hope that Chuck is able to take a look there for what he wants.

I'll take a look too.

Jane Austen - Manfield Park.

Finished it last night and its the second novel (or author) I can think of (the other being Moby Dick) where I avoided it for barely digested reasons (Moby Dick is just about whaling! Austen more for the discourse around her, beginning with those BBC adaptations in the 90s). Once you get into her voice and mode (I had a good couple of hours with the first few pages, it can be hard to get into whereas MD was a gas! Just this miraculous transformation of arcane material in this hot language!) I was finding it ok though irritating (I didn't like the people or the world in it very much) until Fanny grew up and the question of her being **in or out** became a thing (it was there from the beginning of course). It helped that by coincidence I watched Losey's The Go-Between as its a similar set-up - and then also looking at the BLM protests, their focus on a world that began around here.

*Mansfield

Did you start your Austen reading with Mansfield Park? That's bold! I like it, I'll rep it, but I read it knowing it was the most divisive of her books among fans or non-fans and was perhaps looking for an alternative way in. Key to me was reading between the lines, Fanny not quite the character she says she is or other people think she is.

Yeah my first one. What would have been your starting point? Quite like to read another one next year.

Tom: Mansfield Park! You got to be kidding.

Audrey: No.

Tom: But it’s a notoriously bad book. Even Lionel Trilling – one of her greatest admirers – thought that.

Audrey: If Lionel Trilling thought that, he’s an idiot.
Audrey: You find Fanny Price unlikeable?

Tom: She sounds pretty unbearable, but I haven’t read the book.

Audrey: What?

Tom: You don’t have to have read a book to have an opinion on it. I haven’t read the Bible either.

Audrey: What Jane Austen novels have you read?

Tom: None. I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get the novelist’s idea as well as the critic’s thinking. With fiction I can never forget none of that has really happened. It’s all made up by the author.

im Reading breaking and entering by joy williams

^ "Novels are all so full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since Tom Jones, except The Monk; I read that t'other day; but as for all the others, they are the stupidest things in creation."

xp

Maybe Emma. Northanger Abbey was mine though, and it's amazingly funny and easy to like

im Reading breaking and entering by joy williams

― flopson, Tuesday, June 9, 2020 7:44 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

omg <3 joy williams

I'm reading this thread and having a random flashback to Maigret and the Informer: needing a bit of case-related background info, and being x decades from having a departmental computer nerd or geek, M. goes to see a cop known among their colleagues as the Widow---not the Widower: they think, or used to think when they gave a shit, that it's been a longass time since his wife died, and still he sits in certain bars in his rusty black suit, nursing a drink and observing those milling about and occasionally stopping by to deposit bits of info. This is his beat, and his life.
Except that he also sits in his room, where Maigret goes to visit, and I think he has some notebooks, but mainly he's the griot of the grids, and Maigret kind of enjoys asking him questions for the sake of a sure return, better than dropping coins in a vending machine. And as the dried up old Widow replies, succinctly, and apparently accurately, or at least Magrait seems satisfied (he already knows or knows about some of these people places, things and times; he and the Widow have both been around here quite a while), I get a glimpse of so many lives still being lived in this old sector---probably it isn't all that old, but some area majorly affected or constructed during Haussman's drastic recasting of Paris, between the early 1850s and 1870, I think (don't have the book at hand, but it's an early 70s American edition). Not that old as cities go, but there's something so layered, not far from geological measurements, in the cop's-eye view of this city, especially in this brief chapter: kick over a rock, whether you mean to or not, and see what comes out from under---maybe it's because I'm sitting here on a dark soggy summer evening, that I'm struck by this. Oh well, on to the next stop, as with Maigret (off somewhere in my shelves).

I should read Maigret.

NORTHANGER ABBEY has a lot of interest, including lots of discussion of fiction. Quite remarkable novel.

I finished Arthur & George, Julian Barnes. It was OK enough, in that I learned a variety of things about the English police, courts and prisons in the Edwardian period.

I think I figured out what I found off-putting about the author's telling of the story, but I wouldn't want to defend my conclusions in depth; they are more impressions than conclusions. To say it briefly, the degree of intellectual control that Barnes asserted over the story, the characters, and the reader felt so tightly held that there was no interstitial space in which to form one's own meaning. It was impressively articulate, often perceptive, but it felt like being held in a vise and worked on with an engraving tool.