Now reading...

[ejp626]

I wrapped up We Need New Names.  I enjoyed it.  It was sort of in the same vein as Teju Cole's Open City, though focused on a slightly younger girl from Zimbabwe who eventually makes her way to the U.S.

I just read Clarice Lispector's Água Viva, and really disliked it.  I know this is probably her most avant novel, but I am now wondering if I should go ahead and read any of the other novels.  (5 were recently published in new translations by New Directions.)  Still, she is a bit of an acquired taste to be sure.

I'm currently reading a few collections of short stories: Russell Smith Confidence, Stuart Dybek Ecstatic Cahoots and Ivan Vladislavic 101 Detectives.  It's kind of nice to switch between them.

[Brad]

I'm just finishing up Transit by Anna Seghers, reissued by NYRB Classics.  Not sure how I feel about this book.  At times I've found it tedious but it presents a good snapshot of what it was like to be -- and still may be like -- to be a refugee trying to get out and the tedium that goes with it.

[Leeway]

Boredom (aka The Empty Canvas") by Alberto Moravia. 1960. Philosophically brilliant but not significantly emotionally engaging. Another NYRB reissue. 

[BillF]

Boredom (aka The Empty Canvas") by Alberto Moravia. 1960. Philosophically brilliant but not significantly emotionally engaging. Another NYRB reissue. 

Try the movie!

[jlhoots]

A happy surprise - long ago I'd read an early Lethem novel, had no feeling for it, then dismissed him when I saw an interview in which he seemed to believe he wrote better than Philip K. Dick or J.G. Ballard. But this one works. A few stock characters but mostly original characters, an especially vivid narrator-protagonist (sensitive, smart, funny), a hard-boiled detective story with the idiom's virtues amplified - mean-streets atmosphere, suspense - and so far, not many of the idiom's cliches. Far less sentimental than genre writers like Lehane, Burke.

Recently, I read Yasmina Khadra's "The African Equation." The story grabs you. He is such a strong writer, in translation, that it's easy to overlook or miss entirely how conventional his conclusions are or what black-white (in literal and metaphoric senses) cliches he presents (a terrorist who is also a sensitive poet, yet). In fact, as much as I liked "the Swallows of Kabul, "The Attack," and (despite its dishonest ending) "The Sirens of Baghdad," maybe rereading them would reveal flaws.

Lethem gets a lot of grief here, but I really like Motherless Brooklyn.

I also like Fortress Of Solitude.

[Leeway]

Thank

Boredom (aka The Empty Canvas") by Alberto Moravia. 1960. Philosophically brilliant but not significantly emotionally engaging. Another NYRB reissue. 

Try the movie!

Thanks, I was unaware of the movie, I'll give it a look. 

[Simon8]

[A Lark Ascending]

Finished Keith Richards bio. Very enjoyable. Incredibly narcissistic but then when you've been idolised since your late teens and had every bit of bad behaviour lauded for living the R&R lifestyle that's hardly surprising. Matches Michael Ashcroft for wanting to settle scores with colleagues and former lovers! I thought the best things were the early parts on growing up in the south Thames area; and the sheer love of music that gets communicated throughout. 

Half way through:

Just got to the morning of Waterloo with everyone hunting for breakfast. Superb book. Very, very detailed but draws on a lot of testimony from soldiers and other participants who were there giving a human dimension that can be missing from some tactics obsessed military histories. It flips back and forth between the simultaneous battles at Quatre Bras and Ligny over 16th June which means you have to keep your brain sharp. But it works.

Alongside, just started:

Which I'm enjoying. I liked studying Shakespeare at school (though I did what I suspect was the only English A Level ever without Shakespeare [we did Marlowe instead]) and have seen performances, films and read the odd play since. But I've never really got my head round it. Hope to correct that - off to see Henry V at Stratford next week. 

[BillF]

Finished Keith Richards bio. Very enjoyable. Incredibly narcissistic but then when you've been idolised since your late teens and had every bit of bad behaviour lauded for living the R&R lifestyle that's hardly surprising. Matches Michael Ashcroft for wanting to settle scores with colleagues and former lovers! I thought the best things were the early parts on growing up in the south Thames area; and the sheer love of music that gets communicated throughout. 

Half way through:

Just got to the morning of Waterloo with everyone hunting for breakfast. Superb book. Very, very detailed but draws on a lot of testimony from soldiers and other participants who were there giving a human dimension that can be missing from some tactics obsessed military histories. It flips back and forth between the simultaneous battles at Quatre Bras and Ligny over 16th June which means you have to keep your brain sharp. But it works.

Alongside, just started:

Which I'm enjoying. I liked studying Shakespeare at school (though I did what I suspect was the only English A Level ever without Shakespeare [we did Marlowe instead]) and have seen performances, films and read the odd play since. But I've never really got my head round it. Hope to correct that - off to see Henry V at Stratford next week. 

Just before my finals at Leeds University I had a binge on Shakespeare. For 20 days I stuck to this pattern - day 1: read Shakespeare play; day 2: read critical commentaries on said play, and so on. After 3 weeks I felt more into the bard than ever before or since. The course expected us to read all the plays; I managed 22 which proved to be quite adequate. I've always been keener on Shakespeare on the page than in performance - don't forget the Sonnets! If performed, my preference is for the bare, Elizabethan-type stage. I can't stand these modern productions with actors as Boy Scouts or SS officers! 

Edited September 28, 2015 by BillF

[A Lark Ascending]

Wow - 22 plays in 20 days! I'm thinking of 5 years! 

At school I did 'Julius Caesar' for 'O' Level - after some months of being irritated by having to dissect it line by line I came to really enjoy it (clearly because I'd been made to dissect it...but you don't know that when you are 15!). Remember enjoying 'Othello' and 'King Lear' in my first Sixth Form school where we did have to do Shakespeare. When I was about 13 we had to read 'Twelfth Night' which did not go down at all well!! 

In the late 70s the BBC did that complete Shakespeare series which I remember watching a fair few of.

Don't suppose you were a fan of the 'Richard III' film set in some sort of dystopian Mosleyite alternative universe? This sort of thing happens in opera too - I was watching a version of Handel's 'Theodora' a couple of weeks back and that was set in some imaginary totalitarian USA - Margaret Atwood meets Handel! I can live with these things but prefer a plainer approach, set either in Shakespeare's own time or the time of the events he is portraying (however anachronistic he might have been). 

Don't suppose you'll be rushing out to watch the new 'Macbeth' movie? The last one I watched was 'The Tempest' with Helen Mirren which I enjoyed. So much of that play has been mined by musicians down the years.     

Edited September 28, 2015 by A Lark Ascending

[BillF]

Wow - 22 plays in 20 days! I'm thinking of 5 years! 

  

No. Read it again - it was 10 plays (largely revision) in 20 days and 22 was the score over the whole 2-year Shakespeare course.

[A Lark Ascending]

Wow - 22 plays in 20 days! I'm thinking of 5 years! 

  

No. Read it again - it was 10 plays (largely revision) in 20 days and 22 was the score over the whole 2-year Shakespeare course.

Oops! And there was me thinking you were the bionic scholar! 

[mjazzg]

Richard Powers - Orfeo

Powers writes beautifully about music (classical) and the frustrated composer's lot in a novel that also takes in bio terrorism and homeland security. Glad I picked it up prompted by remembering how much I'd enjoyed his "The Time Of Our Singing" (also music themed) many years ago

[BillF]

Just got to the end of this 770-page tome! Liked it at first, but the larger-than-life sensationalist tone palled on me eventually. Was far more impressed by The Secret History which I read some years ago.

[Matthew]

Robert Lowell: A Biography by Ian Hamilton.

[niels]

Just finished:

 

Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita. Nabokov’s prose is no less than brilliant here. I think Humbert Humbert must be one of the most iconic characters I have ever seen a writer create. Reading other comments on this book though, I really can’t understand some people having sympathy/empathy for Humbert. To me he was one of the “lowest” characters I ever came across in literature (and I read a lot of Dostoevsky), someone who misused his intelligence and dignified appearance only to get to his “goal” of sexually abusing a child.

 

 

And now reading:

 

Albert Camus – Exile and the Kingdom ( a collection of short stories which all deal with Camus’ philosophy of absurdism)

 

Isaiah Berlin – Russian Thinkers (a collection of essays on the Russian Intelligentsia (such as Herzen, Bakunin, Tolstoy and Belinsky) in the 19^th century) 

 

Edited September 30, 2015 by niels

[BillF]

Robert Lowell: A Biography by Ian Hamilton.

I read a Lowell biography about 10 years ago, but don't recall if this was the one. Fascinating  - and disturbing - life. Loved the bit where he, briefly imprisoned as a conscientious objector, rubbed shoulders with the boss of Murder Inc, leading to a conversation something like this: "What are you in for?" "Killing people. What are you in for?" "Not killing people." Love his poetry and Life Studies sits on my bookshelf.

[Matthew]

Robert Lowell: A Biography by Ian Hamilton.

I read a Lowell biography about 10 years ago, but don't recall if this was the one. Fascinating  - and disturbing - life. Loved the bit where he, briefly imprisoned as a conscientious objector, rubbed shoulders with the boss of Murder Inc, leading to a conversation something like this: "What are you in for?" "Killing people. What are you in for?" "Not killing people." Love his poetry and Life Studies sits on my bookshelf.

He did live an interesting life.  In America, once Lowell and Allen Ginsberg died, sad to say, the "public poet" disappeared from the US scene (one could also make a case for Maya Angelou), much to our loss.  With the passage of time, Lowell is becoming the 20th. Century American poet, the quality of his body of work is hard to beat, though Theodore Roethke has to be up there also.

[sonnyhill]

[BillF]

Robert Lowell: A Biography by Ian Hamilton.

I read a Lowell biography about 10 years ago, but don't recall if this was the one. Fascinating  - and disturbing - life. Loved the bit where he, briefly imprisoned as a conscientious objector, rubbed shoulders with the boss of Murder Inc, leading to a conversation something like this: "What are you in for?" "Killing people. What are you in for?" "Not killing people." Love his poetry and Life Studies sits on my bookshelf.

He did live an interesting life.  In America, once Lowell and Allen Ginsberg died, sad to say, the "public poet" disappeared from the US scene (one could also make a case for Maya Angelou), much to our loss.  With the passage of time, Lowell is becoming the 20th. Century American poet, the quality of his body of work is hard to beat, though Theodore Roethke has to be up there also.

Roethke is another I read and liked, though it's many years ago now.

[johnblitweiler]

In America Amiri Baraka and Jayne Cortez were "public poets" into the 21st century.  And nowadays Billy Collins and others.

[ejp626]

Just finished Irène Némirovsky's David Golder.  In some ways it is a funhouse mirror version of Silas Marner.  I thought it quite interesting.

I am struggling to get through Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question.  I might as well push on (about 100 pages left) but he leaves me absolutely cold as a reader.  I didn't see what the big fuss was about Kalooki Nights, and I don't think very highly of The Finkler Question.  This will definitely be the last Jacobson novel I attempt.

The next up after this is Machado De Assis's Epitaph of a Small Winner, which I have never read, despite it being a fairly short book.

[niels]

Fantastic book, one of my favorites from Orhan Pamuk!

[Michael Weiss]

Fittingly, almost looks like Peter Boyle on the cover.

Edited October 1, 2015 by Michael Weiss

[Leeway]

An old and still strange friend.