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?

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?

tempted to steal the "xx said: (line break)" tic

also read arnold bennett's literary taste, which was dreadful in more or less the same set of ways i imagined

xpost er they tend to be pretty short books a lot of the time? also i work in an online bookseller and have a fairly long bus trip to get there, which probably helps.

ok. i suppose.

Doesn't reading on the bus make you sick?

Tao Lin: Shoplifting from American Apparel -- wanted to like this a lot more than I did. Weird, affectless prose.

Patrick Suskind: Perfume -- fun grotesquerie (is that a word?), don't believe a word of it, enjoying it a lot

A. J . Liebling: The Jollity Building -- in this big Library of America collected omnibus, non-fiction account of a bunch of con-artists, chancers and other sub-legal "businessmen" operating out of a shithole NY office building around 1940.

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

Don't read Illumination & Night Glare, says Brooke Allen in her review of it called "Carson McCullers: The Story of an Emotional Vampire".

She does say:

Virginia Spencer Carr, and intrepid Southerner, took on the unenviable job and in 1975 produced a very thorough biography that for all its many faults and occasional lapses of taste and insight must be acknowledged a definitive work and one that throws fascinating and often lurid light on its odd subject.

has anyone read christopher logue's version of homer?

Yeah and I'm glad I did.

xp yeah i feel like this bio is gonna be a great source as actual material, but she's such a terrible writer! gah.

harbl: i read a fair amount because i read FAST but the major downside is that i truly don't remember anything about a book once i'm done. which i why i post here the books i've read, but little commentary on them. i am a shallow person.

i read really fast (imo) but sometimes get distracted between reading sessions and might not read for a few days. and if i don't finish the book within a couple weeks chances are i'll never finish it because i'll stop caring. and i used to read about a book every other week (recreationally, in undergrad) but during 3 years of law school i read about 20 books total. now i think i am getting back into reading but it's hard. it's not as fun anymore!

i post little commentary because i'm not that smart about books. lol.

Just re-read The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo, after a lapse of a few decades. It's still a good, simple, quick introduction to Japanese aesthetics.

xp yeah i like to read other ppl talking about books, but even tho i have an english lit degree i am basically useless at articulating anything intelligent about any books i read.

A. J . Liebling: The Jollity Building -- in this big Library of America collected omnibus, non-fiction account of a bunch of con-artists, chancers and other sub-legal "businessmen" operating out of a shithole NY office building around 1940.

The next phase of that is described in here if you have a morbid interest

finished human stain. did not like. i'll try american pastoral someday though.

Thanks, Alimosina--I might just have to check that out.

read a chapbook by iain sinclair on the millennium dome, called sorry meniscus. (eh.) reading a really terrible detective-story-cum-economics-primer called the fatal equilibrium. (by the author of murder at the margin.) finished jeff noon's lint, which i mentioned above, the fake biography of a pulp SF author. which i guess i didn't like all that much, though i laughed like a drain at e.g. lint submitting a script to gene roddenberry in which "the smug, unoriginal blandness aboard the Enterprise finally reaches such an unnatural pitch that it triggers an event horizon, heightening exponentially the vividness of everything else in the universe"

Last week: short, fast, mostly European fiction, some of it read in a fluey state

Rilke - The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Elio Vittorini - Conversations in Sicily
Knut Hamsun - Hunger
Mishima - Patriotism (short story)

Onto Hrabal's Closely Observed Trains and Pessoa's poetry.

Being in the middle of reading the entire A la recherche du temps perdu by Proust, I occasionally need a break, and find myself attracted to, in size, opposite books. Been re-reading parts of:

Walter Benjamin - Einbahnstraße (One Way Street)
Roland Barthes - A Lover's Discourse
H.D. Thoreau - Walden

All three are such exceptional books to just read parts of it, still managing so very good to still a hunger and get lively and inspired.

How is the Proust going? I think I am going to finally start this week myself (was hoping to finish 2-3 more of my inter library loans but I think the postal strike is having an effect here)

Well it's going slower than I expected, but I am really settling in. I believe I am a fairly fast reader, and had to adjust my pace to the language. But I am really starting to enjoy reading Proust 'slowly', as it's how the sentences 'feel' te me as well. So it's not going too fast, but I'm enjoying it thoroughly.

I managed to finally find an out of print boxed version of the whole thing. Hope the strike won't interfere your reading!

"Me Cheeta" - James Lever. Overpraised by some but still good for killing time on a long plane trip.

"Brooklyn" - Colm Toibin. Rather slight, old fashioned, well-crafted, poignant.

2666 - the part about the crimes. I'm working slowly through 2666 taking breaks between sections and with a fair bit of rereading as I go along. I lurch between believing it's head and shoulders the best new novel I've read in years and thinking it's a baggy, pretentious and frequently boring piece of self-indulgence.

I'm 130pp into a long, hard book with small print.

Time out for some St. Mark's poetry. Lewis Warsh, Dreaming As One.

British Painting - CH Collins Baker. Mainly because the first chapter on Medieval painting is by MR James. As in his biblical writings, his style is always clear and measured, and he always has an eye in passing for the grotesque, in this case a drawing on the back of the early 14th century Guthlac Roll, which portrays in crude fashion the placing of the ark in the House of Dagon (Samuel 1.5), who in the picture is given full demonic treatment, floating and grinning impishly above the Ark.

Aside from that detail, I hadn't previously seen any reproduction of the Miracles of the Virgin in Eton college, which look wonderful. Also good are two rood screens at Ranworth, Norfolk and a 13th century Virgin and Child roundel from Chichester, and a crude manuscript picture of Jannes calling up the soul of his brother Jannes, from a tract, The Marvels of the East.

Description of the Low Countreys - Ludovico Guicciardini. Italian quattrocento statesman, contemporary with Machiavelli. Read his Maxims as well recently. There might be argument about how 'Machievellian' Machievelli was, but if Guicciardini's Maxims are anything to go by, he does Machievellian in spades -

Never, from a desire to confer pleasure or to conciliate friends, refrain from doing what will gain you reputation.

amongst others.

Surely Tony Blair would have done well to heed him on war though -

I do not say that a ruler is never to imbue his hands in blood, but that he is not to do so without grave cause, and that in most instances he loses more than he gains by it. For not only does he offend those on whom he lays hands, but displeases many besides; and although he thus gets rid of some one enemy or obstacle, he does not thereby destroy the seed; so that others take their place, and often, as with the heads of Hydra, seven for one.

Guicciardini was actually mainly active in the 16th century, he was born in the late 1400s. I don't know why I described him as quattrocento. He's not a painting.

Incidentally, his Description is chatty and informal, not at all like the generally immensely irritating Maxims.

finished two more of a.m. homes's this weekend: the end of alice and music for torching. alice was okay: it felt like the narrator was kind of a received idea, and the other protagonist's life was really the interesting part. - so only hearing her voice through his act of ventriloquism was a little frustrating.

music for torching was pretty great though. the slightly sardonic third-person works really well for her - tonally it's the closest to the donuts one i guess? - & the way the novel works on the level of plot is great, i think, this total heaping on of events, any three or four of which would suffice to create a 'normal' plot for the suburban-marriage-in-breakdown novel

have been stuck on in a country of mothers for a while. probably three in a row was unnecessary.

oh, and an ed mcbain: the ten men. it's, you know, an early ed mcbain. you learn, again, that meyer meyer has the name he does because his father was a joking man.

Gamaliel made me look up 'Guthlac Roll' on Google Images, and I've now wasted a lot of time looking at these freaky pictures.

Recently read:

William Wharton: A Midnight Clear -- rather excellent WW2 novel which took me a while to get into because of the chirpy, youthful, Holden Caulfieldish narrator (this is based on very dim memories of reading 'Catcher in the Rye')

Yukio Mishima: Death in Midsummer -- short story collection

still working on 'troubles'. i love this dude's writing:

Although he was sure he had never actually proposed to Angela during the few days of their acquaintance, it was beyond doubt that they were engaged: a certainty fostered by the fact that from the very beginning she had signed her letters Your loving fiance, Angela. This had surprised him at first. But, with the odour of death drifting into the dug-out in which he scratched out his replies by the light of the candle, it would have been trivial and discourteous beyond words to split hairs about such purely social distinctions.

“Hm… actually one of our guests wrote a sort of poem, you know, about how the place probably used to look in the old days. Lovely bit of work. Angela embroidered some of it for me on a cushion. I’ll show it to you later on. I think you’ll appreciate it.”

“I’m sure I shall,” agreed the Major.

The dog barked, doubtfully.

xp to thomp:

i really enjoyed music for torching as well - i love that kind of surreal suburban weirdness. in a country of mothers is really... odd. it goes in weird directions. but i read it right after reading the mistress' daughter, which is homes' real life story of dealing with her adoption.

i started memoirs of an anti-semite

Yukio Mishima: Death in Midsummer -- short story collection

You're reading Patriotism and going 'wtf' right? ;-)

Started on Proust now

Tintin In The New World

Not really a full meal. Okay, though.

oh: "by Frederic Tuten".

Am also reading the Martin Beck series out of order this year. Also reading the Rebus series in order, just finished the first Fletch book, and rinsing with selections from Literary Journalism anthology.

You're reading Patriotism and going 'wtf' right? ;-)

Yes, very much so! Bloody hell!

Took the plunge...

Herta Muller: The Land of Green Plums

eric ambler's dirty story, which i enjoyed, but this enjoyment was rather soiled by two things: i. realising it was the middle term of a never-finished trilogy; ii. the fact that one of the mining organisations in it was called UMAD, which i just couldn't stop thinking lol u mad all through

a book of lenny bruce routines, which was funnier than i expected. now starting his autobiography.

william gass's on being blue, which is good, but gass does spend a lot of time going "look at me! me! i'm clever!": i had a dream last night where people were arguing about some of the stuff in this book, actually; in said dream someone claimed the passage of stone-sucking in molloy was "one of the most erotic in all literature"

aaaand i couldn't bring myself to try and read anything sensible so i'm reading a fantasy novel called (rather pretentiously imo) the blade itself

Speaking of not reading sensibly, I have just about finished reading every bit of ephemeral flotsam by Anthony Burgess, as collected in But Do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?, 589 pp of writing he did for newspapers and periodicals, mostly book reviews.

Reading so many of his opinions at one go, one does uncover what were his hobby-horses. For a while, every piece got sidetracked into phonemes and the need for educated people to know linguistic notation.

Yesterday I started John Reed's Insurgent Mexico, wherein he visits Pancho Villa's army as a war correspndent. Despite being clearly sympathetic to the peasant uprising, he is merciless at describing the participants, who come off as ignorant, impulsive, venal and brutal. Their opponents come off even worse.