Now reading...

[ejp626]

Back from a weekend trip to Ottawa with a side trip to Kingston.  Managed to finish Spark's A Far Cry from Kensington.  In a way it was interesting, since I thought the narrator kept acting unreasonably.  I wasn't sure if we were supposed to agree with her point of view or not, and I thought the ending was pretty lame.  In general, I thought this was sort of an interesting anecdote, but would have worked better as a short story than a novel, even a short one.

I also read Manu Joseph's The Illicit Happiness of Other People.  It is hard to describe the book too much without giving too much away, but it is essentially a father trying to understand the shocking act his son committed.  It is fairly philosophical.  I actually thought it had strong similarities to Gadda's That Awful Mess on Via Merulana (which I personally think is somewhat over-rated).  That's really about all I have to say about it for the moment.

I should be able to return to Narayan's Mr. Sampath and finish that up shortly.

 

[BillF]

Continuing with the Edna O'Brien trilogy. I can see why The Country Girls made her name. Powerful and compelling. Seemed ready-made for film treatment and I see there was a TV movie version in 1984 in which the author wrote the screenplay.

[jlhoots]

Colum McCann: Thirteen Ways Of Looking

[A Lark Ascending]

Very enjoyable standard thriller set in Perpignan/Rousillon in France (I had to look up exactly where that was...I knew it was around the Pyrenees but apart from that half remember it changing hands in one of Louis XIV's peace treaties). Like in Donna Leon's Brunetti novels, the main cop has a (largely) happy home and nice family...you don't get much of that in detective novels. They're normally socially dysfunctional.   

Odd cover...gives no indication of what the book is about (except that the weather is very hot throughout). 

Finished 'Passchendaele' which was superb - extensive quotations from the archives from participants brought out the horror; at the same time you got a real sense of the military strategy and the terrible dilemmas facing the staff. The authors got a nice balance between praising the successes and recognising the difficulties alongside condemning the errors (principally launching further attacks into the mud without adequate preparation or real hope of success). Had me thinking how often we all take decisions based not so much on careful calculation as the hunch that what we want to happen might - in this case Haig and the other staff's conviction that the Germans were about to break.

 

Edited November 17, 2015 by A Lark Ascending

[mjazzg]

19 hours ago, jlhoots said:

Colum McCann: Thirteen Ways Of Looking

very much looking forward to that one. I thoroughly enjoyed both 'Let The Great World Spin' and 'Transatlantic'

[Leeway]

THE PROFESSOR - Charlotte Bronte

Bronte's first novel, although only published posthumously. William Crimsworth leaves an oppressive life in England, goes to Brussels to teach, and finds a new life and wife. Many of the themes were later taken up in Bronte's last novel, Villette. I found this work quite engaging, very direct and full of a kind of restless social energy. 

[Leeway]

One of the great RomComs. 

[BillF]

[A Lark Ascending]

I absolutely loved this. I wonderful tale of a woman dealing with grief after the death of her husband, trying to work out what to do with the rest of her life. You very quickly warm to the central character yet as the novel unfolds become aware of how she frightens those around her. Set in the late 60s/early 70s with 'The Troubles' as a distant backdrop - I much prefer novels that glance against historical reality than those that attempt to have their characters at the centre of all the key events. That's how most of us experience the historically significant events of our lives.

So much Irish literature from O'Faolain onwards seems to be about unfulfilled lives set in a provincial, small town, suffocating environment where everyone knows your business and the representatives of the church see it as their duty to tick you off if you step outside of the moral and social parameters they have set. Toibin is also brilliant at evoking the way people rub one another up the wrong way, never completely connecting; and also the muffled but no less vicious impact of the various layers of social snobbery at work in communities. 

There's some lovely sections about the impact of music as well; Norah starts to get meaning back into her life through discovering a love of classical music. Some wonderful passages evoking how music can just flood your world with colours and feelings that might not be there in the everyday landscape. 

I didn't want to leave the characters in this book. 

Edited November 20, 2015 by A Lark Ascending

[jlhoots]

Tom McGuane: Crow Fair

[paul secor]

Tom Stoppard: Night & Day

[paul secor]

Niall Williams: History of the Rain

I'd never read anything written by Niall Williams before, so this was a great discovery for me.

[rdavenport]

 

 

[mjazzg]

Richard Price - The Whites

I don't think I've ever been disappointed by a Price novel. This one certainly appears to be written with his trademark ear for dialogue and eye for societal detail. I've no idea of knowing how accurate a representation of life in NYPD (or indeed NYC) it is but I'm willing to go for the ride 

[jlhoots]

45 minutes ago, mjazzg said:

Richard Price - The Whites

I don't think I've ever been disappointed by a Price novel. This one certainly appears to be written with his trademark ear for dialogue and eye for societal detail. I've no idea of knowing how accurate a representation of life in NYPD (or indeed NYC) it is but I'm willing to go for the ride 

Good read.

Just started The Boys In The Boat.

[ejp626]

I got a bit distracted by other matters, but I recently finished Narayan's Mr. Sampath.  It was one of those books that I went back and forth on whether I had read it before, but eventually decided I had read it before.  I don't reread a lot of books, but I will be going back to Mahfouz's Midaq Alley soon, as well as Kafka's The Trial.

Currently starting into Gloria Naylor's Bailey's Cafe.  The beginning section about the Negro leagues is very boring.  I hear that it goes wide and incorporates a whole bunch of characters, most of them with terrible, tragic lives.  I wouldn't say I am really looking forward to this, but it's a fairly short novel.

[niels]

Just finnished:

Noam Chomsky - The Essential Chomsky
Collection of essays by Noam Chomsky, and a very good introduction to his critical thinking.

 

And just started:

Marc Jansen - Borderland. A History of the Ukraine
Jansen is a dutch historian who became famous (in the Netherlands at least) with his book on the history of Russia which is regarded as the standard to read if you are interested in it's history. With everything going on in the Ukraine he now wrote this book, which also is a huge succes and is also on it's way to becoming the standard to read, if you want to know about the history of the Ukraine. 

[A Lark Ascending]

Excellent. A young man unwittingly caught on the wrong side of a revolution, forced into exile and with the threat of execution over his head. 

The overseas parts didn't work so well but each return to Sligo was rich in the sense of homesickness and the love of place. Written in that sing-song style you get in Irish speech - reminiscent of Joyce and Flann O'Brien. 

[BillF]

Atwood's latest novel, again set in a future dystopia, but unlike the dark Oryx and Crake trilogy and very dark Handmaid's Tale, this one brings comedy into the future world with the on-the-run hero disguised as one of a troupe of Elvis imitators who offer sexual services, as do their Marilyn imitating equivalents. Shades of Woody Allen's The Sleeper! 

Edited November 29, 2015 by BillF

[ejp626]

On 11/27/2015, 8:02:08, ejp626 said:

Currently starting into Gloria Naylor's Bailey's Cafe.  The beginning section about the Negro leagues is very boring.  I hear that it goes wide and incorporates a whole bunch of characters, most of them with terrible, tragic lives.  I wouldn't say I am really looking forward to this, but it's a fairly short novel.

I really do not like this novel, which serves up a mushy magic realist setting to basically recount story after story of women who were mistreated by men (their fathers, husbands, pimps or johns) with one woman also abused by her alcoholic mother, just to provide a bit of variety.  It's pure Oprah-bait, and I think at this point I will just skim the rest to get to that one "uplifting" story that is supposed to help redeem the book (sort of like the Precious movie).

[A Lark Ascending]

Finally finished Ackroyd's Shakespeare book. Glad to have read it but it was a book I could only take 20 pages at a time. The problem lies, I think, in that (as with most early biography) there is so little hard fact to go on. Lots of speculation and I'm afraid I couldn't get that excited by the details of his land purchases or legal cases (I imagine that's where the surviving hard evidence is most plentiful). With monarchs and other top dogs a biography can be built up with all the political events going on all around which are fairly well documented. Not the case with a craftsman like an actor/play writer. 

Ackroyd's interpretation of Shakespeare as a practical, no-nonsense craftsman out to make plays that would enthuse an audience really appealed to me. 

Onto a couple of music books:

  

This originally came out about 30 years ago and was very expensive. One I've been wanting to read for a while - had my eye in second hand shops. This new edition is in a different format and seems shorter (sorry!) but I might be wrong there. So far a plain and informative telling of his life.

As the title says, not a bio but a collection of articles. The first ones are things Matthews himself has written on his own music and that of others (particularly interesting one on Mahler 10 - Matthews and his brother, Colin, assisted Deryck Cooke in the final performing edition from that source. He explains some of the decisions made.) The second part of the book has articles by others of his own music.

Matthews writes very much in a tonal idiom and explains in the early part of the book why. 

Read a lot about this writer on this board. Sci-Fi isn't really my thing but the counterfactual idea of WWII ending a different way appealed. The new film version brought this to the front of my mind so thought I'd like to read it first. Really enjoying it (should finish it today). Especially like the weird mirror effect of reading a book about an alternative ending to WWII with a book about an alternative ending to WWII at its core.

Just over half-way through The Pankhursts biography. Fascinating...the family dynamics were very strange indeed, especially the left-wing/right-wing split between Sylvia and Adela on the one hand and Emmeline and Christobel on the other.  

Edited December 1, 2015 by A Lark Ascending

[fasstrack]

Milestones (Jack Chambers).

[medjuck]

1 hour ago, fasstrack said:

Milestones (Jack Chambers).

Important book. (Even Miles cribbed from it.)  I wish someone would publish an update.  Scarecrow only let him add a chapter at the beginning. 

[Leeway]

VANITY FAIR - Thackeray 

I put off reading this book for a long time, probably scared away by its bulk. Read it over the last week and found it to be the masterpiece it is reputed to be. Deft mixture of sentiment and satire,, and containing one of the great rascals of literature, Becky Sharp. 

[fasstrack]

5 minutes ago, medjuck said:

Important book. (Even Miles cribbed from it.)  I wish someone would publish an update.  Scarecrow only let him add a chapter at the beginning. 

It is said he 'cribbed' voluminously from it for his autobiog....