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[Jon]

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I read George Borrow's The Bible in Spain and loved it. Should really read more by him and I've no excuse really as my dad is a Borrow completist.

"someone who could inhale languages like breathing."

So he claims. In The Bible in Spain he learns Basque in a matter of weeks, after hiring a servant from the region. I do sometimes get the feeling he was not only a braggart but a bit of a bullshitter too.

JL Carr's Month in the Country is a nice bit of English pastoral writing. He also wrote How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers won the FA Cup.

[Amor de Cosmos]

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I do sometimes get the feeling he was not only a braggart but a bit of a bullshitter too.

Me too. I kind of accept it as him being larger than life in a, usually, entertaining way. I'm halfway through Lavengro, he's sixteen and already learned Latin, Greek, "Irish," Romany, French (which he had the most difficulty with), Italian (by reading Dante), and he's about to crack "Welsh." It's a teeny bit OTT.

[Diable Rouge]

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Any particular reason Irish and Welsh are in quotation marks, aside from their relative difficulty? Of course, if he had a classical education, Latin and Greek would have been automatic, which would have greatly assisted in acquiring Romance tongues.

Greatly enjoyed The Testament of Gideon Mack - mostly written in an Alexander McCall Smith whimsical style, but far weightier, dealing in themes such as familial relationships, the conflict between traditional and modern attitudes to religion, the gradual transformation of Scottish society in recent decades, and whether secularisation has thrown the metaphysical baby out with the bathwater.

[WOM]

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I'm most of the way through The Immortalists, about Charles Lindbergh and Dr Alexis Carrel's experiments in keeping organs alive outside the body for transplantation. Fascinating stuff, but not enough to string into a book of this length. You won't much like Lindy after reading it, it's fair to say.

[Amor de Cosmos]

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Any particular reason Irish and Welsh are in quotation marks,

Because I'm not certain that is the accepted name of the language in either case. Is it? It's what Borrow calls them, but his "Irish" would have been Gaelic perhaps?

Of course, if he had a classical education, Latin and Greek would have been automatic,

He hadn't. His father was a soldier moved around Britain constantly. He learned Latin as child from a text-book someone gave him. He picked up Greek (along with Italian and Flemish) from a Huguenot immigrant he met when his family finally settled in Norwich.

[San Bernardhinault]

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You won't much like Lindy after reading it, it's fair to say.

I've read nothing about Lindy's post 1927 life that makes me even vaguely sympathetic to him. He seems to have been a pretty unpleasant character all round.

[Diable Rouge]

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Amor de Cosmos wrote: Any particular reason Irish and Welsh are in quotation marks,

Because I'm not certain that is the accepted name of the language in either case. Is it? It's what Borrow calls them, but his "Irish" would have been Gaelic perhaps?

Gaelic was the standard name for the language in Victorian times, but in order to distinguish it from Scots Gaelic, it's almost always referred to as Irish now. As for Welsh, I've never seen any other English word for the language, but I stand to be corrected by OTF's Cambrians.

[Lucia Lanigan]

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I'm all about essays by Czech poet-immunologists today. This by Miroslav Holub is a beaut: short, plainly poetic meditations on science that pack a lot into a few words. 'Shedding life' finds him killing a muskrat and considering the afterlife of blood (sample paragraph: "Multicellular life is complicated, as is multicellular death. What is known as the death of an individual and defined as the stoppage of a heart - or, more accurately, as the loss of brain functions - is not, however, the death of the system that guards and assures its individuality. Because of this system's cells - phagocytes and lymphocytes - the muskrat was still, in a sense, running around the pool searching for itself.")

[Edie St Pierre]

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Just started: 'Crome Yellow' by Aldous Huxley. Really liking this. A dinner party at some big posh house in the 1920's. Brilliant writing. I can see who the early Evelyn Waugh was basing himself on now. Huxley seems to really like the people he's ripping the piss out of too though.

Halfway through: 'Ice' by Anna Kavan. Really densely written. It has a deceptively dreamlike feel, but i'm forever having to go back and re-read bits that drifted past me the first time.

Been reading and re-reading lots of George Orwell essays recently. 'Inside The Whale', 'Raffles and Miss Blandish', 'England My England', 'The Decline of The English Murder' and so on. He's fucking brilliant isn't he? I'd forgotten how good he was.

[Edie St Pierre]

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Finished 'Crome Yellow', a brilliant book, proper fun read and I really enjoyed it.

Now reading 'Journey to the End of the Night' by Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Mainly because George Orwell really bigs it up in 'Inside The Whale', he called it one of the greatest books ever written. About thirty pages in, and i'm enjoying it in fits and starts, the prose is a bit ugly in places, but I don't know if that's the fault of the translation, but every couple of pages or so it really takes off. It has the feel of a picaresque novel so far, like 'Candide' set during World War One. There doesn't seem to be a plot as such. I'm enjoying it though.

[Edie St Pierre]

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Still working my way through 'Journey to the End of the Night', it's great but the atmosphere is incredibly, oppressively cynical and bleak, alieviated somewhat by the fact the protaganist is pretty much in a state of perpetual motion, plus there are some very funny bits and some fantastic insightful bits.

Also been reading lots of books about old cinema, Tallulah Bankhead's autobiography 'Tallulah!' is great fun as is Robert Evans' autobiography 'The Kid Stays In the Picture', also have been trying to get hold of Veronica Lake's autobiography, but it's been out of print since the 60's apparently, because its full of stuff that was construed as libellous.

Been sort of skim-reading 'Shepperton Babylon' by Matthew Sweet, a history of British cinema from the mega-optimistic and sunny post-Lumière Brothers Edwardian and early 20's stuff to a pretty sordid and depressing conclusion in the awful David Sullivan financed sex-comedies in the early 80's. There's some fascinating material in the book and Sweet is a good writer - massively passionate about his subject too - but there's a spiteful edge to the book that gives the whole thing a nasty undertone, which is maybe a post-modern nod to the Kenneth Anger death-and-scandal-fest the title alludes to, but still grates on me a bit. And it's odd because the guy comes across as really likeable and engaging in the film on British Silent Cinema he did around the same time. Here the callow nastiness of some of his asides gets on my wick.

There's some great stories in here though and its made me really want to know more about people like Meggie Albanesi, Pen Tennyson, Victoria Hopper, Basil Dean and loads of other people i'd never heard of before.

[nmrfox]

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The Trundlers by Harry Pearson arrived this morning and early indications show that its a worthy follow-up to the excellent Slipless in Settle.

[Crusoe]

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Recent reads:

The Gone-Away World, Nick Harkaway: darkly comical post-apocalyptic fiction set in a vaguely Mad Max world laid waste by a war that makes things 'go away', or sometimes come back worse. Lots of diversions and tangents, some bizarrely unfulfilled, and a surprising and powerful twist about three quarters of the way through.

The Pendragon Legend, Antal Szerb: easily digested 1930s Holmes/slightly supernatural thriller, much improved by being narrated wryly by a Hungarian protagonist with a keen eye for puncturing other nationalities.

Futebol, Alex Bellos: Brazilian football history and culture. Was going for a couple of quid on Amazon. The chapter on language (the gender of the ball, the history of nicknames) was the best for me; some of it a little hit and miss.

You, Austin Grossman: set in the late 1990s, a games designer has to find a show-stopping bug that could bring down his company. A nice potted history of game development (fun if you played a lot of games in the 1980s and 1990s), but undermined by a bizarrely undernourished plot (which doesn't even start until about halfway through the book) and sketchy characterisation. Not bad, but not in the same league as Grossman's previous (Soon I Will Be Invincible).

Austerity Britain (Tales of a New Jerusalem), David Kynaston: thorough, wide-ranging and enjoyable social history of the immediate post-war years (not a dry read, despite the title).

Spurious, Dogma and Exodus, Lars Iyer: trilogy of two dissolute philosophy lecturers on a Withnail-style downward spiral. Occasionally impenetrable and repetitive but also often hilarious and vitriolic.

Angelmaker, Nick Harkaway: slightly more straightforward thriller - a clock repairman with a long criminal family history that holds the key to saving a world imperilled by long dormant epistemological secret weapon, a 90-year-old femme fatale ex-spy, and a supporting cast of lawyers, terrifying oily bureaucrats, serial killers and mad monks idolising John Ruskin. Nicely paced and stays just the right side of silly.

Gave up and didn't finish: Jutland 1916 and Kursk - gone off military history in a big way. Unremittingly grim. The President's Hat (Antoine Laurain) - gentle novel of how Mitterand's lost hat transforms the lives of various individuals in 1980s France, Littlest Hobo-style, by bestowing upon them perspicacity, self-respect and authority; fluffy, whimsical (nto a million miles from Amelie) and ultimately unsatisfying.

Next up: Drown by Junot Diaz (short stories, I think; I enjoyed his Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), and The Great Railway Revolution (Christian Wolmar's history of the US railroad system, only bought because it was 99p and I know nothing about this area). Not in a hurry to actually read that one.

[beak]

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Just finished T. H. White's The Age of Scandal, possibly my favourite history book. A collection of essays harking back to a golden age when people could get away with pretty much whatever they want:

Another eccentric was the nautical Hervey who married the notorious Miss Chudleigh with a ring of the bed-curtain. She was the maid-of-honour who had reached the headlines by going to a masquerade in a gauze dress as Iphigenia the Sacrifice, 'but so naked', said Lady Mary Wortley Montagu acidly, 'that the high priest might easily inspect the entrails of the victim'. This Hervey subsequently abetted her bigamous marriage to the Duke of Kingston, during his own lifetime.

A final oddity, John's grandson, used to wear padded waistcoats to fight duels, kept his father tied to a bear, and ended by being hanged.

The Marquis de Sade, in real life not a very sensational person, would have paled beside Mrs Brownrigg, who whipped her apprentices to death. A Mr Waddy in the Irish troubles ate half a priest (Barrington, I. 264).

Made better, somehow, by the author being unabashed about his desire to return to such times.

I read Bez's book and all. It was fun.

Erich Fromm's Fear of Freedom has, as I predicted, fallen into the big pile of books I've put down halfway through.

I, Claudius is in grave danger of going the same way, as I just received delivery of two Wu Ming books, including Altai, the sequel to the excellent, excellent Q.

I also dipped into some J. G. Ballard whilst flying lately, but it didn't really take.

[Levin]

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Wu Ming 1 is in conversation at the ICA on 1st June. I suspect some of OTF might be interested in that.

[Vicarious Thrillseeker]

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Mat wrote: Just started: 'Crome Yellow' by Aldous Huxley. Really liking this. A dinner party at some big posh house in the 1920's. Brilliant writing. I can see who the early Evelyn Waugh was basing himself on now. Huxley seems to really like the people he's ripping the piss out of too though.

I just downloaded that as part of my summer reading collection - it's free on Kindle as well. Also downloaded The Enormous Room by e.e. cummings, Against The Grain by Joris-Karl Huysmans, Kingsley's The Water Babies and The Monk by M.G.Lewis. Free downloads for book club include Voltaire's Candide, King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard (which I'm reading now) and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, which I read a long, long time ago and feel like revisiting.

[Uncle Ethan]

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Quick thanks to Crusoe for the Bryant and May tip. Could cost me a fair bit though.

[beak]

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jw wrote: I, Claudius is in grave danger of going the same way

Crazy talk. This book is mint.

[beak]

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JT Captain Leader Legend wrote: Wu Ming 1 is in conversation at the ICA on 1st June. I suspect some of OTF might be interested in that.

Couple more dates on their micro-tour:

Wu Ming
Upcoming Events

May 29, 2013 London Review of Books Bookshop
Wu Ming at the LRB Bookshop
The writing collective discuss their work with Christopher Tayler
May 31, 2013 Waterstones Birmingham New Street
Altai: A Novel comes to Birmingham
Wu Ming 1 presents the latest thrilling historical novel from the writers of Q
June 01, 2013 Institute of Contemporary Arts, London
Altai: Wu Ming and Stewart Home in conversation
An ICA Quickfire event

Madly jealous of anyone who attends, obvs.

[Lucia Lanigan]

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Ferdinand Pessoa's Book of Disquiet. The idea's great - assembled fragments written under various heteronyms that amount to a kind of anti-book which reflects more closely your experience of life - but each one of these characters is saying exactly the same thing: "*sigh*, I'm a bit separate from it all". It ain't that deep, just a bit enervating. There's been a whole world of fuss made about this guy but I'm about ready to bail.

Ronald Firbank, though, is brilliant. He used to write his books on postcards, surrounded by flowers, in hotel rooms, and you can sort of tell: they're very elegant. I'm reading 5 Novels, which is a nicer way of saying I'm reading Prancing Nigger in that book, and it's great.

[Gerontophile]

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I managed to get hold of the latest Sara Paretsky. It is very good. (It hasn't been published yet in the UK.) Yes, I am a smug twat.

[WOM]

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Just finished Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood & the Prison of Belief by Lawrence Wright.

Uh...frightening, informative, insightful, well-researched and corroborated, and deadly dangerous to the author if just 20% of the stories are to be believed. Excellent history of L Ron Hubbard and his writings/teachings/philosophy, and a cautionary tale told through the lens of current/past Hollywood adherents, like Paul Haggis, John Travolta, Tom Cruise and many more lesser lights.

Interestingly, it isn't being published in Canada for fear of lawsuits. Even more interestingly, when I ordered it via Abebooks, it was the only transaction I've ever made through the service that was cancelled by the seller. (I've probably ordered 100 books through Abebooks over the years.) I finally had to buy it in person when we were in Florida.

[beak]

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Altai turned out to be an excellent read, much like its predecessor. Proper rip-roaring historical adventure (with lots of parallels to modern affairs) centred on the Ottoman-Venetian War of 1570-1573 and the invasion of Cyprus.

Absolutely graphically brutal in parts, which may not be to everybody's taste.

[Lucia Lanigan]

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Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. I've never done Hemingway, and feel vindicated having read this (perhaps unfairly - I imagine he was a bit of a wreck by the time he wrote it). It's a diverting account of life as a young writer in the Paris of blossoming Modernism, until he starts going on about fishing and racing and man stuff. I do find his faux-folksy delivery cloying, though, and I can't decide whether his repetitious phrasing was part of that or a tribute to his mate Gertrude Stein (who comes across as a massive pain in the arse). Suspiciously well-remembered, unlikely-sounding conversations between him and people like Joyce and Pound abound.

But if you ever find yourself suspecting Paris at its modernist peak would have been a golden age to be part of, this book is an antidote. Great work was emerging, for sure, but you'd probably run a mile from the people who were making it. They'd only speak to you to touch you for a few quid, then tell their other patrons you were a philistine and draw a caricature.

Mind you, his diss of Wyndham Lewis led me to dive in to the formidable Tarr - set in Paris just before WW1 - at last. So far so good, but you do need the notes to get into it (lots of thinly disguised contemporary figures and references). Once you see what he was doing, it's very impressive though - his prose portraits are as definite as his paintings. He was absolutely an arsehole of his age (though not a fascist at any point) but perfectly open about it, to the detriment of his rep in the long run.

[Lucia Lanigan]

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Here is Hemingway's diss of Wyndham Lewis, who arrived while Hemmy the Hemster was teaching Ezra Pound to box (cause that's the sort of thing he did):

Wyndham Lewis wore a wide black hat, like a character in the quarter, and was dressed like someone out of La Boheme. His had a face that reminded me of a frog, not a bullfrog but just any frog, and Paris was too big a puddle for him. At that time we believed that any writer or painter could wear any clothes he owned and there was no official uniform for the artist; but Lewis wore the uniform of a prewar artist. It was embarrassing to see him and he watched superciliously while I slipped Ezra’s left leads or blocked them with an open right glove.

I wanted us to stop but Lewis insisted we go on, and I could see that, knowing nothing about what was going on, he was waiting hoping to see Ezra hurt. Nothing happened. I never countered but kept Ezra moving after me sticking out his left hand and throwing a few right hands and then said we were through and washed down with a pitcher of water and toweled off and put on my sweatshirt.

We had a drink of something and I listened while Ezra and Lewis talked about people in London and Paris. I watched Lewis carefully without seeming to look at him, as you do when you are boxing, and I do not think I had ever seen a nastier-looking man. Some people show evil as a great race-horse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre. Lewis did not show evil; he just looked nasty.

Walking home I tried to think what he reminded me of and there were various things. They were all medical except toe-jam and that was a slang word. I tried to break his face down and describe it but I could only get the eyes. Under the black hat, when I had first seen them, his eyes had been those of an unsuccessful rapist.

...

About a week afterwards I met Miss Stein and told her I’d met Wydnham Lewis. “I call him the Measuring Worm,” she said. “He comes over from London and he sees a good picture and takes a pencil out of his pocket and you watch him measuring it on the pencil with his thumb, seeing exactly how it is done. Then he goes back to London and does it and it doesn’t come out right. He’s missed what it’s all about.”

Now, those pictures are pretty damn good, and there was a lot more going in them than Stein recognised. And Hemingway there flounders around all over the place, perhaps trying to pre-empt Lewis with a Lewis-worthy put-down of Lewis, but telling us more about himself than his quarry. All Lewis devoted to their meeting in his autobiography was this:

A splendidly built young man, stripped to the waist, and with a torso of dazzling white, was standing not far from me. He was tall, handsome and serene, and was repelling with his boxing gloves a hectic assault of Ezra's. After a final swing at the dazzling solar plexus Pound fell back upon his settee. The young man was Hemingway. Pound got on like a house on fire with this particular statue.

No need to for expansive insults when you see people as mere statues.