Current Reading - Books best thread

[Levin]

Cheers gt3 I'll have a look. Your Great Tamasha rec in Cricket books was on the money.

[gt3]

Cheers Levin Return of A King and Nine Lives are good places to start.
Glad you enjoyed The Great Tamasha

[San Bernardhinault]

Agree totally on Dalrymple. Return of a King is a fantastic book.

[Tony C]

It's been a good few years since I pre-ordered a book that wasn't about football but I have done so with John Cooper Clarke's autobiography which I await with some enthusiasm.

[Sam]

Finished The Turn of the Screw. I understand that the overlong, clause-laden sentences are meant to give the reader the same sense of unease the governess herself is experiencing, but bloody hell it results in it taking a long time to read for such a short book.

I've been consciously reading a lot of contemporary litfic this year (until The Turn of the Screw, but it's been ages since I read The Hound of the Baskervilles and my project to read all the (Conan Doyle-authored) Sherlock Holmes stuff in order of publication has thus been derailed a bit, so next up is a quick dive back into that with The Return of Sherlock Holmes.

[jameswba]

I think I'd rather have the Max Beerbohm version of Henry James than James himself :

“It was with a sense of a, for him, very memorable something that he peered now into the immediate future, and tried, not without compunction, to take that period up where he had, prospectively, left it. But just where the deuce had he left it?”

[Sporting]

I think I'd rather have the Max Beerbohm version of Henry James than James himself :

“It was with a sense of a, for him, very memorable something that he peered now into the immediate future, and tried, not without compunction, to take that period up where he had, prospectively, left it. But just where the deuce had he left it?”

That's great. Where does it come from?

[jameswba]

That's great. Where does it come from?

From a collection called The Christmas Garland : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Garland

I was introduced to the Henry James one after struggling through one or other of his later works at university. It's nice to know that he enjoyed it himself.

[Sam]

Ah, this is a case of all his stuff being like that rather than a stylistic decision for the ghost story, then? Not sure I'll bother checking out any more, in that case. Agreed, though, that reading that James enjoyed it is a relief.

[jameswba]

It's generally said that most of his later work is like that, ie it's a style he developed over time. I do remember enjoying Roderick Hudson, which is from his more readable early phase.

[gt3]

Portrait of A Lady remains one of my all time favourite books. Nothing happens for ages and then suddenly it has happened. And continues to happen.

[laverte]

i'm really fond of Henry James, all phases included; he's just about the only pre-WW1 writer i seek out to (re-)read. i've rediscovered a couple of unsent letters from my late teens, and my writing style really obviously reflects the fact that i was devouring James at the time: it's all sub-clauses and winding syntax and blustery evasiveness. It sounds weird, but not as weird as my previous Lives of the saints phase!

i've been reading (Jamaican) Stuart Hall's unfinished not-quite-memoir Familiar stranger, from which i have learnt the somewhat surprising information that Hall wrote his postgraduate thesis on Henry James. He found in James a fellow diasporic intellect, shuttling about between mimickry and distance, distaste and a kind of reluctant envy, cosmopolitanism and a sense of belonging, always straining to assert that it can indeed view more clearly the mores and manners of the inner circle from its vantage point there on the outskirts, at the inbetween. Hall is sensitive to the sense of drama in James's fiction, the moments when difference and resistance to difference can no longer dance* around one another and must step into each other; and he praises James's incredible control and mastery of these clashes, how they're often deflected and disavowed by the characters, the powerful refusing to acknowledge that any conflict exists, that there is more than just one way – their way – to exercise will. Hall doesn't say as much, but i think i detect also in both men a generosity, a respect for their audience's intelligence, and a hunger not just to unwind complex social entanglements but to explore them exhaustively, where the pleasure is to be had in the unwinding and exploration, rather than in any anticipation of what it might lead to. Hall refers to James as a dramatist who couldn't write drama; Hall himself always seemed to me so rigorously committed to theory that it prevented him from committing to (particular) theories.

*Hall also allows himself a little boast about what a good dancer he was, and i couldn't help imagining a scene where Hall tries to drag Henry James into a jazz club, and persude the precious old man to shake his big timid body about a bit. Yes, it's been a long lockdown, my friends.

[jameswba]

*Hall also allows himself a little boast about what a good dancer he was, and i couldn't help imagining a scene where Hall tries to drag Henry James into a jazz club, and persuade the precious old man to shake his big timid body about a bit. Yes, it's been a long lockdown, my friends.

That's a wonderful image. I've often imagined the (I think) quite famous incident from the other end of his career - not long after he first arrived in England - when he tried to get George Eliot to have him in for tea and was very poorly received. Malcolm Bradbury describes it nicely in one of his histories of the British novel.

I just wish I could have got into his novels a bit more. But never say never, and this thread might just be the inspiration to try Portrait of a Lady again and then perhaps one or two of the later works that put me off all those years ago.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Talk of Henry James leads me to John Banville to whom he's frequently compared stylistically. Any fans or boo-birds? I'm curious but think I might start with his 'Benjamin Black' penned whodunnits, as they're likely to be less intense.

[Lang Spoon]

I read The Book of Evidence and found my whelm undered. The real story of GUBU is far more engrossing.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Hmm. The Book of Evidence would have been a likely choice so thanks for the heads up.

[Sporting]

I had to read Henry James for my degree. Washington Square was all right (though I can't remember the plot) but his later works are, for me, almost unreadable..

[jameswba]

We're in decent company with this reaction to James' later work. Edith Wharton and Thomas Hardy apparently said similar things.

Re Banville, I also remember being disappointed with The Book of Evidence. I have a book of his non-fiction at home, but have never got far with that either.

[RobW]

Currently reading Stuart Cosgrove's last book in his Soul trilogy; Harlem '69: The Future of Soul . Magnificent as ever, though having to stop reading on virtually every page and listen to a song he's mentioned, or add an album to my 'to listen to' pile. This week i've been largely listening to Betty Davis.

[Tony C]

I'm finding John Cooper Clarke's autobiography rather less invigorating than I anticipated. It's surprisingly long and drawn out - I'm about 250 pages in and he's still doing his apprenticeship. As someone born in Manchester in the 50's there are a hundred points of mutual reference for me but if you didn't have that sense of shared experience this book would drag even more. Hopefully it picks up a bit and we might at least get something scurrilous about Nico or John Cale but right now it's hard work. And not especially funny.

[imp]

I remember reading a John Banville novel several years back about English Soviet-era spies, The Untouchable. I was massively impressed with his writing and promised myself to read more of his stuff, but have never got back around to him. (Have just looked up his bibliography - bloody hell, he's a prolific bastard.)

Have never even tried to tackle Henry James. Was it him who wrote the short story about a guy walking along a beachfront and talking to a bloke on a bench who's heavily scoring through and correcting a book of short stories, or maybe it's a novel? Turns out it's the author of the stories himself, perpetually unhappy with his own work, even after it's been published. A bit writer-up-himself kind of fiction, but I can relate.

[RobW]

Currently reading Stuart Cosgrove's last book in his Soul trilogy; Harlem '69: The Future of Soul . Magnificent as ever, though having to stop reading on virtually every page and listen to a song he's mentioned, or add an album to my 'to listen to' pile. This week i've been largely listening to Betty Davis.

Finished reading it last night. What a wonderful trilogy, and have got so much listening to do. Incredible tale of American society at the end of the 1960s.

Went to the library this morning and got Dune out. Something I should have read as a teenager but never got round to it.

[Jobi1]

Ploughed through Don DeLillo's latest this week, The Silence. As I posted on Goodreads, I've really enjoyed some of his work in the past (the obvious ones), but this was a big miss for me. The premise seemed so interesting and potentially exciting, but somehow with such a dramatic setting, and even in such a short volume (it comes in at under 120 pages of widely spaced type), it felt like a bit of a slog.

The crux of the matter is, despite the big, inexplicable phenomenon that is unfolding, very little actually seems to happen. Instead, we mainly just have the meandering thoughts of a handful of characters who are, in the main, intensely irritating.

Towards the end, one of the characters says "I revisit old notebooks sometimes and it amazes me to read what I thought was worth writing." Can't help but wonder if DeLillo will feel the same looking back at this book.

[Tony C]

In what is now a twelve year old, 97 page thread I think I may have previously mentioned my admiration for the social history writing of Stuart Maconie. I've just begun 'The Nanny State Made Me' and I'm very much enjoying it. For someone like me Maconie's work is an unchallenging, 'easy' read, in as much I think in very much the same way that he does so it's essentially a case of my worldview being validated. That's not always a healthy thing, of course, but I'm not really looking for confrontation these days.

[Jobi1]

I really like Stuart Maconie too; his writing is wonderfully evocative and entertaining. My only slight complaint is I feel he sometimes strays perilously close to inverse snobbery, like in Long Road from Jarrow where he comes back several times to what feels like a rather boastful refrain about never having previously set foot in a "Wetherspoon" – including his, in my opinion, contrary use of the singular (correct as it may be, strictly speaking). Thankfully, he does keep that stuff to a minimum in general though.