Current Reading - Books best thread

[Diable Rouge]

Current Reading - Books best thread

steveeeeeeeee wrote:

I'm coming to the end of TGWTDT and it's got better as it's progressed. I needed a good page-turner after run of quite challenging books and this gave me everything I was looking for and a bit more.

I've got a bunch of stuff which was given to me by a work colleague, any advice on the following?

Zoe Heller - Notes on a Scandal
Colm Toibin - Brooklyn
Ballard - The Crystal World
Saul Bellow - Seize the Day
Kate Summerscale - The Suspicions of Mr Whicher
Elizabeth Taylor - The Devastating Boys

A few people at work have told me "Notes on a Scandal" is good, so I'm leaning towards that.

Brooklyn is only average, as usual Toibin's characters are well-drawn and he does portray small-town Irish attitudes well, but otherwise it's just your standard emigration novel - better to read The Master, Mothers and Sons, or Homage to Barcelona.

[Sam]

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Yes LL, that's a fantastic collection. I may get it in Spanish before leaving here, if I get through enough of the other books I brought out here and have bought here before my trip home for Christmas.

I don't watch Lost by the way. I'd like to make that clear.

[Lucia Lanigan]

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You know what, twice in as many days when I've been reading that Cortazar book on the Tube, a South American-looking person has gawped at me for stops on end, smiling to her/himself at my book. That's how good he is.

[Sam]

Current Reading - Books best thread

The same South American-looking person?

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Two different ones. (Or were they?)

[Heliotrope]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I finally read On Chesil Beach (my current reading and movie watching never means things just released), and it was fantastic: an economically told story yet with many layers, so much to think about afterward. What a contrast to Underworld, which I read two years ago and just hated. That was an overrated, unenjoyable mess.

After I raced through On Chesil Beach, I looked up reviews online and was shocked to see that Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times totally trashed it: Edward and Florence are "two incomprehensible and unlikable people." What a misreading, I think.

[Sam]

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Having finished La Invención De Morel last night whilst unable to sleep, I've now started Miles by Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe. As the title suggests, it's Miles Davis' autobiography. If you're easily offended by bad language, I would not recommend it...

[Amor de Cosmos]

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A book I'm currently reading for thesis purposes is W.T. Lhamon's Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop.

Ordinarily I'd be reluctant to post research texts, but this is so damn fine, and intersects with many of the interests people have expressed on here I think it's worth mentioning. Essentially it does what it says on the jacket, it's a history of black urban performance art, especially dance, from the late 18th century to date. That doesn't begin to do it justice however. For anyone who knows New York — not that I do — the early chapters are a brilliant evocation of life in the Catherine Market and Five Points area in the 1820s. Lhamon traces the social and cultural interactions of newly freed slaves, waves of incoming rural whites and new immigrants and reaches some interesting conclusions, especially regarding the contemporary meaning of minstrelsy and blackface. Yes it's academic, but it sure doesn't read that way.

[steveeeeeeeee]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I'm currently working my way through a bunch of TEFL related books in preparation for my Diploma in English Language Teaching course, which starts next month. I've so far read "Uncovering Grammar" by Scott Thornbury (excellent, enlightening and enjoyable, like everything he writes), then I read "How to Teach Pronunciation" by Gerald Kelly (boring but on a topic which is generally my weak point as a teacher and I really needed to brush up on it). I'm currently half way through "Implementing the Lexical Approach" by Michael Lewis, which is alright but I've been trained in most of the stuff he's explaining, so it's a little bit redundant.

Wow, I bet that was interesting to read.

[steveeeeeeeee]

Current Reading - Books best thread

And I was halfway through 2666 on my holdiays, but I left it in my in-laws' garden whilst taking a toilet break and one of the two abandoned dogs who live in the forest behind their house stole it. So, there's currently a couple of abandoned dogs guarding it, which is quite Bolaño-esque in a way.

Apart from that, I was enjoying it but didn't think it was a patch on The Savage Detectives.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Just read Albert Angelo by BS Johnson, which I really enjoyed. It's a good little city novel and period piece; Albert's a supply teacher in Angel Islington, travels across London with his mate, misses his ex and usually ends up in a Turkish, Somalian or Nigerian cafe on Cable Street. There were kebabs, drugs and horrible, rutting teenagers in 1964, don't you know.

In a way it's a shame he's associated with 'experimental' tricks, cause while his style obviously owes something to Joyce and Beckett, it's not really that far removed fom Colin MacInnes, Alan Sillitoe or even Kingsley Amis. Or perhaps an episode of Hancock's Half Hour directed by Jean Luc Godard. This one's the infamous 'book with a hole through the middle', except it's just a rectangle cut through three pages - it just works as a flash-forward would on TV or film, adding a glimpse of greater violence into his account of a brawly pub crawl. One section is presented in double columns, one for public speech, the other for inner monologue - it's not very far out, really. The whole thing's a pacey, entertaining read (mainly dialogue and monologue) with note of depressive exasperation ringing through now and then.

Well done, Bryan. Gold star.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Apart from sundry philosophical stuff I won't bore you with, much of my time recently has been taken with JR by William Gaddis. Because it's fucken enormous. I can't actually remember what I was reading before.

(Oh, yes I can. Lies by Enrique de Heriz which I liked a great deal. Very arch, very thoughtful, deeper emotional core than you often get in tricksy metafiction.)

JR is awesome. I mean it's maybe not quite as amazing a literary achievement as The Recognitions, but it's the funniest thing I've ever read. It may be the greatest piece of satire in the language, it's genuinely as good as Swift. It's difficult, because it's about 800 pages, all in dialogue, with it frequently being (deliberately) hard to tell which character is speaking. But it's a dizzying, joyful farce, and a biting, vicious lash at capitalism, both at once. It's deadly serious, and laugh-out-loud funny on every page.

Was it Lucia Lanigan who read his Agape Agape? Well, one of the characters in JR is trying to write that. Literally, trying to write that book. And he's not even the one most reminiscent of Gaddis.

It's a staggering piece of work. I'm shifting Gaddis past Joyce into "Century's Most Important Novelist" territory, nationalism and fame bedamned.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Wow, I just popped in to talk about JR, whose finishing line I'm fast approaching. What are the chances of this happening on a football messageboard?

It's a remarkable book, but I disagree with you in exactly the ways I'd expect to.

I think there's a seriously great 300-page novel in there which Gaddis didn't know how to write (or, more accurately, edit). For stretches early on it's amazing: the 'roving microphone' delivery ('auditory voyeurism' as the introduction has it) is a superb device for revealing the total saturation of late capitalism, from school budgets and sponsorship to the financial services' tiny percentages, endlessly deferred, and the artist's lot. At its best, it moves with the grace of that famous tracking shot in Goodfellas, only the written word allows a much grander scale. Almost every anxiety that fills the internet and news channels now, he pretty much had down in 1974 - even the junk mail was all financial scams and porn. And as is so often the case, the word 'difficult', frequently attached to his name, is a casual libel – good dialogue's always an engaging read, and it is a screamingly funny farce a lot of the time. (Although I think 'joyful' would be pushing it; the outlook is always bleak.) He's surprisingly good at rendering relationships too, for A Clever Bugger.

But - it is pointlessly wearing for very long stretches. Gaddis seems like one of those people whose flat is crammed to the ceiling with all the collected detritus he can't bring himself to throw out: there's so much realistically rendered dialogue that doesn't reveal, intrigue, entertain, or even provide a sense of disorder and disconnection, that you will want to kick JR across the room. One hundred-page stretch would have worked better at around five - I honestly don't think he knew what he was attempting to do there. And good satire demands good timing.

So while you could make impressive claims for JR, Agape Agape probably does more in its 95 scorching pages than this book has so far in nearly 700. Awful as it is, circumstances (terminal cancer) seem have forced his hand for AA - like most great novels it's more than a purely intellectual exercise, which I'm not sure JR is. People will always come back to Ulysses because it's human, fun, moving, small; not just to admire the formal innovation, high cultural allusion or LOLz.

I get the sense that Gaddis's Achilles' heel (geddit) may be a questionable scorn for everything outside of the high cultural certainties he grew up with, whereas the true modernists tended to embrace or at least work more creatively with that stuff. His rage against the philistines, while not inherently a bad thing, can leave him looking like a vacuous snob at times, because he hasn't shown how he's earned it - we're all just going to hell in a handcart, and it's everyone else's fault. When JR says to his teacher "- Hurry up hey, it's time" the reference to The Waste Land is obvious, but it doesn't actually do anything except vaguely spell out 'doom'; it's almost like a ringtone asserting a cultural allegiance.

Which is a shame, cause I think he was that hair's breadth away from genius.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

I want to post a proper rebuttal, but am locked out of my email so thinking that should teach me a lesson...

You're right. How much do I love this board?

What I will say for the moment is that the point about excessive length is just something I can't agree with. It certainly takes the narrative down a halfbillion blind headways, but I think that's not only deliberate but adds to it. All of every potential in-and-of-itself-nonsensical thing that take place, the narrative makes clear, are things that could be equally important. Part of putting all that noise in his books is making clear that the story he eventually homes in on is a *tiny* part of the greater narrative.

Moreover, I think the "earned it" thing is a perfectly wrong remark for JR. I see exactly why you think it, but biographically he had been working twenty years in advertising as a copywriter since The Recognitions came out and was ignored. I think it's written with the bitterness of someone who knows exactly what The Beast is like; indeed if I were to suggest a single flaw in the book, it would be that he never seems as detached as he seems to mean to be. The bitterness is *too* personal...

Hmm. Do you want to start a new thread for this when I'm sober?

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Nah, I don't have the energy and it ultimately boils down to taste, but riff away.

I absolutely disagree with your point about the length: a stronger writer could have done everything JR does in 300 pages more effectively than in 700, simple as. The idea of the blind alleys, noise etc looks good as a pitch, but you don't have to be subjected to them at such enormous length to sense that they're there. This is always going to be subjective, but it simply doesn't have an accumulative effect for me: I get it, Bill, now tell something worth telling. As I say, the strength of Agape Agape lies in the way it gets so much across - including blind alleys, false starts, U-turns - with such momentum in 95 pages. I was actually shaking by the time I finished it; it's like an hour-long blast of John Coltrane at his fieriest.

By 'hasn't earned it' I mean it's not a given that he's a genius. It's obvious (and often amusing and hair-raising) that the book's informed by Gaddis's real-life misfortune - but it's a fate so commonplace in every creative field that it's almost the norm. In fact, the ill-treatment of geniuses from Mozart to Melville ($144 he got for Moby Dick, IIRC) is a recurrent riff, and while it's fascinating in itself, I did sometimes think, "Hang on, do you think you're like Mozart or something?" or, "You've spent hundreds of pages bemoaning what looks like the uniquely awful lot of the artist in contemporary America; but you wouldn't have been any more fortunate in 1780s Vienna - what are you getting at exactly?" Plus, you know, Gaddis's day jobs were better than mine and he managed to get five admired novels published and raise a family - it doesn't feel like the tragedy I think he was reaching for.

Still, I certainly wouldn't want to put anyone off reading him. Many of you seem better disposed toward Big American Novels more than I generally am, and it's certainly one of those. And Agape Agape - hardback or paperback with some essays thrown in - is currently selling for 1p on Amazon, which seems grimly appropriate.

[Mr Shit]

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Just finished "With The Old Breed" by Eugene Sledge, used by HBO to make "The Pacific."

How he retained his sanity living through that is a mystery.

I've read a lot of war books but this is the most intelligently-written and detailed account I've seen.

[Lucia Lanigan]

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Ann Quin - Berg

Wow. A queasy oedipal comedy set in an off-season seaside town, written in crystal clear prose that keeps subtly wrong-footing you even as it keeps the action moving inexorably on. There's nothing else like it; it's just such sharp, original storytelling (newspaper quotes from the time were spot on: "the clarity and purity of a glass of water"; "vividly intense and almost palpably immediate"). Quin's prose takes its lead from Beckett and Joyce, and there are hints of existentialism, catholic guilt and even surrealism in there, but it's unique; innovative and entertaining at once.

She was a contemporary of BS Johnson, but while he was an excellent writer who had mistaken ideas about the nature of his talent, you get the sense that she knew exactly what she was doing. This is easily one of the best post-war British novels.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Severo Sarduy - Maitreya

Cuban postmodernist (the good kind: hedonistic, intelligent, 1970s) riot that opens with theatrical Tibetan religious ceremonies and climaxes in a baroque fisting. Decorative prose, but not over-fussy: some really beautiful and fun moments; occasionally a little too rich and stilted for the action to come through, but that might be the translation.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Claude Simon – Triptych

The Nobel winner’s take on the nouveau roman, more or less, written in the Seventies. Three blocks of narrative description that segues between recurrent scenes, apparently developing in real time: kids looking for fish in a stream, a drunk couple shagging in the street, a dead rabbit being skinned, a teenage boy doing his maths homework (not to mention “doing his maths homework” in the sense of having a wank), a circus performance, a scene being shot in a film studio with a naked woman and older man, a film projected on a cinema screen, a holiday postcard, pornography, scenes in posters, more fucking.

He uses a cinematic point of view (it’s never clear who the narrator is or how he comes to see all this) but narrative associations to link between scenes in a way that briefly trips you up: you might be watching an old lady sucking her teeth as she pulls a dead rabbit from a drawer and suddenly you’re back with the couple whose fellatio you’ve just read a detailed description of; or you might think you’re watching live action only to find it echoed in the contents of a picture he switches to. Hard to say why it works, but it does; perhaps he’s just got a knack for picking watchable things to read about, and plenty of them; other nouveau romanciers are sometimes too monomaniacal to keep me hooked.

It's kind of brilliant, and might be the most French thing ever created. He even has a couple of English people pass through, seemingly just so they can be a bit shit and have no taste.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Djuna Barnes – Nightwood

At a glance, it’s almost a parade of miserable rich failures pronouncing pompously about life and love; but what they say is just too strange, vivid and disarming to get on your thruppenies. A real one-off, and one of the best Modernist novels; it was known for years for its bold depiction of openly gay characters - lesbians centre stage, at that - but that’s perhaps less striking now than the style and Barnes’ genius for creating torment. The transvestite 'Doctor' is a phenomenal creation; imagine a skid row Uncle Monty if he were actually erudite and incapable of cliche.

TS Eliot, in his introduction, suggests that "only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it" and compares it to Elizabethan tragedy – overstatements that nevertheless give you some idea of how to take the poetic soliloquies and the off-kilter world they conjure. Brilliant stuff.

[Brandenburger Toro]

Current Reading - Books best thread

You're doing yeoman's work on this thread, Lucia, and turning up some cracking stuff which I'll be sticking in my pile.

I'm in the last two hundred pages of Against The Day - which is much longer than some perfectly good novels, but virtually the closing paragraphs of this - and will have something to write about it shortly. It will be very, very positive...

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Andre Breton - Mad Love

Some glorious poetic passages and attractive anecdotes aside, this is crippled by Breton's attempts to theorise and lock down the very chance happenings he espoused as the saving grace of art and perception. He comes across as a "fairies at the bottom of the garden"-style tit at times; back in real life, the ever-lengthening lists of things he disapproved of - #67: "Teh Gays", by the way - and expulsions from his gang point to his petit bourgeois unease with the kind of uninhibited creative activity Surrealism unleashed.

It a real shame that people mention Breton first when they talk about Surrealist literature, cause there's some amazing stuff out there. Read Nezval's victorious Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet (and anything else you can track down), or Eva Svankmajerova's Baradla Cave instead.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Current Reading - Books best thread

And now I'm 100 pages into Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. I may be some time; talk amongst yourselves.

[Gangster Octopus]

Current Reading - Books best thread

We were.

[Renart]

Current Reading - Books best thread

Just finished Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America. Good, and often funny, dissection of the way corporations, new age charlatans, and ministers exhort us to "think positively," and always look within ourselves rather than to collective political action to solve our nation's problems. She makes an interesting case for "positive thinking" as an inversion of our previous Calvinism: the constant internal monitoring is still there, only now we ferret out signs of "negativity" rather than sin, and seek a more worldly success rather than salvation.

I also just read Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist, which is very funny, and has some interesting things to say about poetry, too.

I'm now reading Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and am not yet sure what I think of it.