It's Fall, and the Autumn of the year, and the store of fruit supplants the rose - so what windfall words have you been reading?

Never read the first, the sequel is ok. stuff about art dealers is pretty interesting, they're like social-climbing used car salesmen. stuff about the author's lovelife, less so.

I'm reading the Martin Beck series in reverse because I've been buying used paperback copies for a couple bucks each and that's what order they've appeared in the store. Not the best way to proceed, especially in terms of Martin's development. So far so good, pretty consistent though the international there of The Terrorists is a stretch. Can't quite put my finger on what's so compelling about Martin Beck and his chilly milieu. One thing: I like how the other cops all get on each others nerves with their quirks and personalities.

the international there

there = theMe. "the international there" sounds like sarah palin speak/

flanerry o'connor - the violent bear it away

this book is incredible.

Maybe the best thing she wrote.

Dan Chaon, Await Your Reply (creepy, some beautiful true passages alongside some that go clang)
Brian Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree (sci-fi history, pretty okay)
Clarice Lispector, The Apple in the Dark (have the bio on hold from the library, want to read them simultaneously)

Clive Barnes – Cultural Amnesia

oops that's Clive James. Clive Barnes was - or maybe still is - longtime theater critic for the NY Post.

You sure it wasn't Clive Barker, lovebug?

I caught a cold and put aside Consciousness Explained until my brain he works less bad. I've just been randomly browsing on essays and belle lettres.

all you martin beck fans should read the kurt wallander books as well! i dont think theyre quite as good but a lot of the same odd swedish policier stuff shows up--incl for example all the policemen getting on each others nerves--but most importantly they both partake of this horribly depressing grey nordic tao thing

A couple more Richard Starks -- The Handle and The Rare Coin Score
Wilson Tucker: Ice and Iron (odd SF novel--near-future bace at the foot of a glacier, which is part of a new oncoming Ice Age, is troubled by the bodies of charred Stone Age humans and Mesopotamian bricks dropping out of the sky)

harbl how is go tell it on the mountain? i read another country recently and just wasn't sure about it.

― thomp, Wednesday, September 16, 2009 4:01 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

ok finally finished and don't know what to think. i really liked some parts (especially the middle 100 pgs or so) but the ending made me feel ???? and i wasn't sure if i understood the entire book at that point. i haven't really liked or understood a book in a while though tbqh

ha well that kind of sounds like something i might like to read

all you martin beck fans should read the kurt wallander books as well! i dont think theyre quite as good but a lot of the same odd swedish policier stuff shows up--incl for example all the policemen getting on each others nerves--but most importantly they both partake of this horribly depressing grey nordic tao thing

― fleetwood (max), Sunday, September 27, 2009 5:04 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

^^ there's also that one icelandic crime novelist whose name i am blanking on, the first one got film adapted last year - arnaldur indrithason! him. he's pretty good. but yes, the whole HULLO DID YOU KNOW WE HAVE A SUPRISINGLY HIGH SUICIDE RATE AND SOME PRETTY COLD WEATHER vibe

AND LOTS OF KNOWLEDGE ABOUT OUR LOCAL DNA

Death and the Dervish by Mesa Selimovic. Reread Watership Down and Anne of Green Gables.

the resonance of the dna thing is kind of amazing, what with blood debt being a central trope of early norse lit., iceland being a country where everyone still uses patronymics, etc

admittedly on any other level bar literary value i think the creation of the dna record was a very weird and flawed policy, but oh well

er, xpost.

just started 'troubles' by jg farrell. excellent thus far.

John O'Hara: Appointment in Samarra

i started the human stain because i have never read a philip roth before and i rarely read anything from the 20th c., and even rarelier read anything from the late 20th c. and i'm not sure if i like it. i feel like i'm not old enough to read it.

no reason i picked that one btw--was walking through and saw it on the shelf

I can't imagine not liking it, or indeed any Roth from Sabbath's Theater on. I'd be interested to know what's making you uneasy.

I have only ever read 'Portnoy's Complaint', of Roth, which I quite like. He's always seemed maybe the most dull of the grand old men of American Postwar Lit to me, for some reason. (n.b. not 'worst' and definitely not 'most obnoxious')

I am reading A.M. Homes' Jack, which so far seems to be something of a small marvel.

Oh, and Steve Aylett's biography of a fictional cult SF novelist, which is a bit too snarky to read more than five pages of at once.

haha i don't feel uneasy i guess. i am difficult to please. i'm going to read it all. it does seem a little dull. maybe mentioning the clinton scandal in the beginning set the stage though; i was 14 when he was impeached.

Finally a book I can brag about: NOTES FRM THE UNDERGROUND by that dude Dostoyevski. Pretty good but I can only manage ten pages at a time. hah

haha, i couldn't put that down when i read it. i think i ended up staying in bed all day until it was done.

Just finished Farmelo, The Strangest Man. Onward.

now i'm confident i will survive the human stain. i guess i'm just not used to it. i always read old books. most of them really old. so if a book mentions viagra i feel like i have to let it age 100 years before i read it. i don't know what my problem is!

ugh the human stain--watch out for the weird bird metaphor.

do you say ugh like you hated it? will watch for birds

yeah i hated it--for some reason i read the book once, dug it, didn't remember the metaphor, and then started it again years later and got to the bird thing and ugh. American Pastoral is the bee's knees, though

ok. i am trying to get into the 20th century.

i need to read more 18th and 19th century--tried reading notes from the underground, couldn't get into it.

i really loved american pastoral. hated portnoy's complaint. but i don't really like that style - that really sort of ridiculous satire style of writing. it grates on me like an episode of seinfeld.

*yes* that's how i feel!

just finished symposium by muriel spark - it was ok but i liked the last one i read better (memento mori). just started a biography of carson mccullers, by virginia spencer carr, but it's not very well written and it's v v v long. if anyone can recommend a better bio, i would appreciate it. am almost done with two alice munro short story collections - so excited for her new book coming out soon.

i started the greatest american novel by roth (not sure if that title is right), and 10 pages in i knew it was gonna be ~that~ style and gave up. but yeah, american pastoral is totally different. it's pretty tragic but really engrossing.

Symposium & Memento Mori are like 20 years apart, right?

20 pages in I downgraded the AM Homes book from 'a small marvel' to merely 'very good', there's something a little unexamined about a lot of how she represents teenage attitudes. But on the other hand a lot of it is very well observed plus occasionally hilarious plus er 'affecting', you know, so I'm not complaining. Kind of curious - I keep encountering the detail that she wrote it "at nineteen" but as far as I can work out it came out when she was 28 -- makes me wonder whether the final draft is the 19 year old version or whether she had 7-9 years to improve on it.

hmm i thought it was published when she was 19. actually, i think i read that it was 'based' on something she wrote for a class when she was 19.

it's probably my least favourite of her novels - it's much softer and more sentimental than her other books. i have 'the safety of objects' and 'los angeles' half-started beside my bed.

I *love* American Pastoral but I made the mistake of reading a load of reviews afterwards and they barely mentioned the terrific characters, the intensity of Roth's craft, or the sheer joy of the backstory - they were all about framing devices and unreliable narrators. They may well be correct, but I was totally dispirited - I love it because it's the best story ever, not because it's a meditation on the nature of fiction.

much softer and more sentimental

I'm not entirely sure of this — I don't think the only other one I ever read (the donut one) escapes sentimentality to any noticable degree. That one was a bit like Don DeLillo but chirpy.

But yeah, er, the fact that Jack's immediate homophobic reactions aren't invested with any degree of seriousness, I think — that's where I started having trouble with it, and where it's most 'soft', I guess.

The remainder store had pretty much all her others, though, so I will probably be buying those this weekend.

I recently read "Treasure Island" by Robert Louis Stevenson for the first time - I figured I should read it sooner or later. It didn't disappoint. A classic piece of story-telling with some indelible characters, esp. Long John Silver

Now I'm reading "Beyond Belief" by V.S. Naipaul.

I finished The Island at the Center of the World by Russell Shorto yesterday. It was really great, a kind of intimate history of Dutch Manhattan. It would make a great film. Several great films, probably.

Carson McCullers...if anyone can recommend a better bio, i would appreciate it.

Not a bio of her alone, or her complete life, but I really enjoyed 'February House' by Sherill Tippins, which is a 'biography' of a sharehouse in Brooklyn where Auden, McCullers, Jane & Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten and stripper Gypsy Rose Lee all lived together at the same time. McCullers became obsessed with Gypsy.

I started The Counterlife by Philip Roth today. I've enjoyed what I've read, it's quite unfussy - I think it's the first big Zuckerman book I've taken on (as opposed to one where he's just an incidental to the main story) and I was worried it was going to be about the nature of writing or some other dullery, but he's playing it straight so far. I've been scarred by Operation Shylock I think.

has anyone read christopher logue's version of homer?

Yes. It's really good I think.

read two or three of the early parts, earlier this year. after someone mentioned them on that poetry thread i started. i don't know if the parts i read are great or i merely like them a lot. that said the only line i can remember as a line is the big typographic one in 'war music'. and a vague feeling of some of the camera instructions making me think of donald fagen singing 'haitian divorce'.

tonight i have finished afternoon men, which seemed rather like it actually possessed all the flaws people claim to find in a dance to etc etc, the affectation and the snobbery and so forth. Still find this sort of thing horribly funny, though:

"Pringle had been in pretty good form all day. Barlow said:
'What's come over him? It's like when one of the critics said there was a quality of originality about his treatment of water.'"

thomp how do you read so many books?

OT: Time for a "winter" thread, I say.

Gamalie I don't consider KA a genre writer. He wrote some genre stuff, sure (although I haven't read much of it) but the stuff that seems core to me - Take A Girl Like You, Stanley and the Women, The Old Devils etc - is social comedy. I don't think that qualifies as genre fiction, unless you're going to call people like Jane Austen, E M Forster and Evelyn Waugh genre writers.

I'm a big fan but for me KA ends up being minor because he didn't manage to write at the top of his game for really sustained periods. There are great things in many of his novels, but there are no great novels. My guess is this was really a failure of will - KA was deeply neurotic, beset by personal problems and phobias and cauterising those - through socialising, women, booze, being a professional gadfly and curmudgeon - too often mattered more than the writing.

Re: the stuff about novelists and their big ideas, there is an interesting article by ILX pariah Gilbert Sorrentino about ILX cult favorite Edward Dahlblerg in his collection of essays Something Said where he says something like: he has no ideas but that's OK, he's a novelist and novelists are not supposed to have ideas, they are supposed to write well, which he does.

Motion's biography of Larkin portrays Kingsley Amis as the dominant male personality in Larkin's life, a sort of enforcer of a shared attitude. I don't have the book with me but there's a passage that states that Amis was always there to search out and destroy any sign of literariness or earnestness. A sort of Two Lads Against the World philosophy.

Another critic wrote of Auden that a posture of adolescence held on into adulthood quickly becomes seedy. Larkin's and Amis's lives seem to have become seedy right away. My feeling is that Larkin was powerful enough to transmute his life circumstance into literature (while keeping the faith in his letters) and Amis never could.

Larkin is profound enough for me within his scope. Maybe the right scale isn't intellectualism or genius, but how ruthless you are with yourself. The two both armored themselves against life, but somehow only Larkin was able or willing to write around that.

Almosina I disagree about the relative success Amis and Larkin has in transmuting life into literature, but that's a difference of taste and temperament.

But wrt Amis being the "dominant male personality in Larkin's life, a sort of enforcer of a shared attitude" - if there was a dominant personality in the relationship it was Larkin. Larkin was less of a social animal than Amis, colder if you like, and Amis's approval mattered less to him than his mattered to Amis. Amis always behaved like the eager-to-please junior partner, something Larkin seems to have accepted as no more than his due, even when Amis achieved much greater worldly success. While Kingsley - who of course had ambitions as a poet himself - continued throughout his life to proselytize enthusiastically for Larkin's reputation as a poet, and seems to have felt nothing other than pleasure and pride in Larkin's successess, Larkin deeply (and not altogether secretly) resented Amis's success and the wealth and celebrity that came with it.

scott, how did you get on with alasdair gray?

Colum Mccann - let the great world spin.

i'm somewhere near the beginning, and it's fine, but somewhat cliched,isn't it?