Now reading...

[Morganized]

Just polished off Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, which I loved. Thinking I'll tuck in to another Irish-American novel next: perhaps Tom Kelly's Sandhogs.

Just started this one. So far so good.

[Leeway]

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea for the first time since sixth grade. It's better than it has any right to be, but I'm still trying to figure out why H.G. Wells gets credit for starting SF...

I assume you mean why Wells rather than Verne?

[jazzbo]

We all know it was Mary Shelley.

[jlhoots]

Eleanor Henderson: Ten Thousand Saints

[Jazzmoose]

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea for the first time since sixth grade. It's better than it has any right to be, but I'm still trying to figure out why H.G. Wells gets credit for starting SF...

I assume you mean why Wells rather than Verne?

Nope. I meant Wells. Verne should get the credit.

As for Shelley, I fall into the 'anti-science fiction' doesn't count camp. Yeah, I know it's a cop out...

[Shawn]

Robert Heinlein - Expanded Universe

[BillF]

Still reading latter-day Le Carré! This one was pretty good.

[jazzbo]

[ejp626]

I wrapped up Banville's The Sea. Flashes of Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier towards the end. Not sure I felt they were earned. In general, I wasn't particularly moved or even interested in this book. At least it was short. Pretty inconceivable that it won the Booker.

I am enjoying David Bezmozgis's The Free World considerably more. This is a novel about the movement of Soviet Jews towards other countries in the late 1970s, primarily Israel, U.S. and Canada. The family at the heart of this novel is waiting out their time in Rome until they get clearance to enter Canada. ...

The Free World ended up being a very solid novel that sort of supplements some of the Soviet fiction I was reading for a while (esp. Vladimir Voynovich). I'll probably go seek out his first book of short stories.

I also brought Banville's The Infinities on the train with me. Unbelievably fey and unmoving (in the sense I actively disliked all the characters), I decided to abandon this after the first chapter. Banville is definitely not my kind of writer. I actually found the same with Nabokov, though there are a remaining few of his novels I will probably force myself to finish.

[A Lark Ascending]

I absolutely loved 'The Sea' when I read it a few years back. I was on the west coast of Ireland at the time, so maybe that influenced me. I really liked his one based loosely round Anthony Blunt and the Cambridge spies too - 'The Untouchable'

Just finished:

Now starting:

[Jazzmoose]

Getting ready for the movie?

[jazzbo]

Yes. Re-reading this, after re-reading A Princess of Mars a few books back.

Edited February 26, 2012 by jazzbo

[paul secor]

Nelson Algren - A Wall On The Wild Side

Know what novel you meant, but the title you posted brings a very different scenario to mind.

[jazzbo]

A bizarre book of interest to PKD nuts.

[Pete C]

John Carter of Mars plays a mean Martian clarinet.

[Head Man]

It reads like it sounds....guaranteed NOT to cheer you up.

[ejp626]

Ok, I finally wrapped up Ellison's Juneteenth (March 1, not Feb 29 as planned). I just found it really disappointing. In many ways, it is Ellison grappling with and perhaps trying to one-up Faulkner. Ok, you want stream-of-consciousness, I'll give you an entire book alternating between two characters' streams-of-consciousness (one of whom lies dying in a hospital bed). Almost nothing happens after the first chapter, they just delve into their separate pasts.

Maybe, just maybe, I could excuse that, but we never get a plausible explanation for how the former child minister could have gone on to become an early film maker -- and then become a Senator from New England! Certainly the impression one has of New England is that it is relatively insular, particularly in regards to its politicians, and that a complete unknown with a checkered past is going to become a Senator? And that his entirely political platform was to engage in race-baiting? When New England (particularly in the early part of the 20th C) pretty much defined itself by its abolitionist past? Sorry, Ralph, this is weak-ass stuff that makes no sense at all. And then when we finally see a little bit of the story of how Hickman "inherits" Bliss, who will become the boy preacher, it also has no internal logic.

To me this book failed on basically every level, though there were occasional passages of interesting writing. I don't really think Ellison could have salvaged it had he lived, since the basic premise and set-ups just don't make sense.

[B. Goren.]

Milan Kundera - The Joke.

[BillF]

Less impressed by this Le Carré from 1999.

[jazzbo]

[Head Man]

Reading his obituary recently I realised that I'd never read anything by him.

I'm really enjoying this:

[BillF]

John Litweiler, Ornette Coleman: The Harmolodic Life

Thank you, John, for inspiring me to get out my Contemporary and Atlantic Ornette vinyls again!

[ejp626]

I'm about 1/3 into Chester Himes Pinktoes, which is a comedy about Blacks and whites trying to get into each others' drawers up in Harlem. It is far more comic in tone than If He Hollers Let Him Go, which had some black humor, but overall was an intense, angry book. Interestingly, towards the end of his life, Himes had returned to a fairly dark, sardonic humor in the Harlem Cycle. This is perhaps the most relaxed Himes's novel I have read.

I just wrapped up Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers (his first novel), which was basically about a callow, over-privileged lad trying to screw an older woman (about 2 months older ).

SPOILER

It shouldn't be that much of a surprise that he is taken at Oxford despite bungling his exams. It's a little hard to know just what Amis is getting at here -- that the so-called radicalism is just a front, at least among the upper class. That the smug Oxbridge class always looks after their own. That Charles (the narrator) is a pompous twit, but really no worse than anyone else. Somewhat recently Amis reread The Rachel Papers and found it pretty crude and poorly constructed, even for a first novel. I can't really argue with that. At least he had the decency to wrap it up in about 200 pages, unlike some of these 400+ page "masterpieces" that just don't know when to stop.

Edited March 15, 2012 by ejp626

[jazzbo]

I've read Pinktoes, pretty interesting read.

Edited March 15, 2012 by jazzbo

[ejp626]

I've read Pinktoes, pretty interesting read.

I think it is the most purely entertaining Himes I have read, but it wouldn't really be a good introduction to him (for a novice), since it is so different from everything else he wrote (even The End of a Primative, which also foregrounds inter-racial relationships). That said, I also like The Harlem Cycle, but in a different way. I'll try to return to it in a few more years.