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[jlhoots]

Jennifer Egan: Manhattan Beach

[ejp626]

While it had a few moments of interest, ultimately I found Bombay Time to be too disjointed, delving into too many marriages (most unhappy or tragic, with 2 happy marriages detailed).

I'm about halfway through Atwood's Moral Disorder and am enjoying that.

It will be one of Mahfouz's shorter novels, Love in the Rain, next.

[paul secor]

On ‎9‎/‎27‎/‎2017 at 4:28 PM, BillF said:

Just finished re-reading this old favourite in this edition.

Published in 1950, it's often seen as a precursor of Lucky Jim and the associated school of novelists. A delightful book!

The cover designs of those old Penguin editions had such classic style.

Edited October 27, 2017 by paul secor

[BillF]

6 hours ago, paul secor said:

The cover designs of those old Penguin editions had such classic style.

Yes, it's a beautiful looking book. I've kept my copy since 1966.

[crisp]

Quentin Blake, yes?

I read that Cooper novel some years ago although its appeal escaped me, I'm afraid.

[BillF]

11 hours ago, crisp said:

Quentin Blake, yes?

I read that Cooper novel some years ago although its appeal escaped me, I'm afraid.

Quentin Blake, yes.

On 9/14/2017 at 1:44 AM, kinuta said:

Deliciously well written and enjoyable.

It really does feel like a long lost , previously unpublished part of the cold war series.

He brilliantly recaptures the prose, mood and atmosphere of his great work.

So good I'm keeping in check my natural impulse to binge read the whole thing.

Binge reading might have helped me - I kept losing the plot, hopping as it did between various decades. I'm afraid it read to me like a response to a tick list from avaricious publishers for more of the same. OK, he's valuable property, but at 86 you could just let him stop writing.

[kinuta]

2 hours ago, BillF said:

Quentin Blake, yes.

Binge reading might have helped me - I kept losing the plot, hopping as it did between various decades. I'm afraid it read to me like a response to a tick list from avaricious publishers for more of the same. OK, he's valuable property, but at 86 you could just let him stop writing.

I read it over 3 or 4 days and can't say that I had any real problems following the plot.

On the other hand, my Asimov binge ended in a haze of confusion and back tracking lost threads.

He has some great ideas but can be really long winded.

On 26/10/2017 at 2:46 AM, paul secor said:

In the useless information department, I used to teach Dr Kobayashi, a professor of music and accomplished pianist, who had been Seiji Ozawa's good friend for 40 odd years

I never got to meet him.

Murakami lives two stations down my local line.

[BillF]

Some wonderful, well written comic touches in this one.

Edited October 29, 2017 by BillF

[Dave Garrett]

5 hours ago, BillF said:

Some wonderful, well written comic touches in this one.

There was a good piece from Longreads this week about the author's obsession with Vintage Contemporaries paperbacks (a series that was ubiquitous in US bookstores during the 1980s), in particular Bright Lights, Big City.

Judging Books By Their Covers 

[BillF]

2 hours ago, Dave Garrett said:

There was a good piece from Longreads this week about the author's obsession with Vintage Contemporaries paperbacks (a series that was ubiquitous in US bookstores during the 1980s), in particular Bright Lights, Big City.

Judging Books By Their Covers 

Interesting! 

Thanks.

[ejp626]

7 hours ago, Dave Garrett said:

There was a good piece from Longreads this week about the author's obsession with Vintage Contemporaries paperbacks (a series that was ubiquitous in US bookstores during the 1980s), in particular Bright Lights, Big City.

Judging Books By Their Covers 

The Longreads piece didn't do that much for me, but the piece he linked to was quite interesting:  https://talkingcovers.com/2012/09/12/vintage-contemporaries/

I particularly find Richard Yates's reactions amusing, as he just didn't like the covers at all.

I haven't read all the Vintage Contemporaries, but certainly a fair number.  Being in the Vintage Contemporary line-up was a fair indication that the book was solid.  Maybe some day if I get through all my other reading (fat chance), I will just go through the list once and for all.

 

What I really ought to do is see if some crazy person has put the entire series on eBay and just buy it and stick it in my basement.  I'm not entirely sure how long it would take to collect the individual titles, especially as so many used bookstores have gone out of business.

Edited October 30, 2017 by ejp626

[ejp626]

On 10/16/2017 at 3:33 AM, BillF said:

Continuing my re-reading of the excellent Frank Bascombe trilogy.

Have you read Let Me Be Frank with You, which is sort of a coda to the trilogy?

[BillF]

4 hours ago, ejp626 said:

Have you read Let Me Be Frank with You, which is sort of a coda to the trilogy?

I have, yes, and it's pretty good, but no more than a coda, if you know what I mean.

[Brad]

On 10/11/2017 at 0:30 PM, jlhoots said:

Maybe even better - both are great!!

Finished Going After Cacciato last week.  A very unusual book.  So many things to think about. 

[ejp626]

I've just finished Isherwood's A Single Man, which I guess could be called A Single Day in the Life of a Single Man.  It is interesting to compare the fairly buttoned-down George to the let-it-all-hang-out Wilhelm from Bellow's Seize the Day.  To be fair, there was a point (in the past) when George broke down in the company of his friend Charlotte, over the death of his lover, but now George keeps these emotions in check.  However, given the rivers of booze that flow through this novel (indicating perhaps Mad Men wasn't so far off the mark) and poor George's liver, there is a bit of suspense over what exactly will come out of his mouth while he is drunk.  The novel is somewhat radical in how it describes an older male lusting (privately) after a fair number of younger men.

Given how much of the novel is an interior monologue (maybe 65%), I'm struggling to imagine how they turned this into a movie.  (Most people who have read/seen both, consider the movie a pale imitation of the novel.)  I may check out the movie one of these days, but I am in no hurry.

I'll be reading Bradbury's The History Man next and then Austen's Sense and Sensibility.

[BillF]

4 hours ago, ejp626 said:

I've just finished Isherwood's A Single Man, which I guess could be called A Single Day in the Life of a Single Man.  It is interesting to compare the fairly buttoned-down George to the let-it-all-hang-out Wilhelm from Bellow's Seize the Day.  To be fair, there was a point (in the past) when George broke down in the company of his friend Charlotte, over the death of his lover, but now George keeps these emotions in check.  However, given the rivers of booze that flow through this novel (indicating perhaps Mad Men wasn't so far off the mark) and poor George's liver, there is a bit of suspense over what exactly will come out of his mouth while he is drunk.  The novel is somewhat radical in how it describes an older male lusting (privately) after a fair number of younger men.

Given how much of the novel is an interior monologue (maybe 65%), I'm struggling to imagine how they turned this into a movie.  (Most people who have read/seen both, consider the movie a pale imitation of the novel.)  I may check out the movie one of these days, but I am in no hurry.

I'll be reading Bradbury's The History Man next and then Austen's Sense and Sensibility.

Interesting Isherwood/Bellow comparison there! I've read and seen at some time or other all you mention in this post. Highlights were Seize the Day and History Man. Sense and Sensibility was hard going at school at the age of 16 when my main interest was rock 'n roll.

[ejp626]

I've actually been reading a fair number of short stories, in addition to various novels.  I'm currently midway through Anthony Trollope's Lotta Schmidt and Other Stories.  These are generally pretty solid stories.  One or two have a bit of a twist (predating O. Henry), though in a way I was impressed by a story about a young writer, on the verge of starvation, who doesn't miraculously acquire a patron at the 11th hour, which I had been expecting from the set up.  The denouement was a bit more interesting than that.

One book that just came out is F. Scott Fitzgerald's I'd Die for You and Other Lost Stories.  Some of these are stories that were a bit too dark for periodicals of the time (or at least under his byline, given what the public expected from him).  But in most cases, he had a policy of refusing to accept any editorial advice, and then just filed the stories away if they couldn't be sold "as is."  I'm very sorry to report back that, in most cases, Fitzgerald was wrong and far too proud at this stage of his career, as these definitely could have used editing.  Quite a few are corny (especially his movie treatments turned into stories), and one has so many factual errors (claiming that the subway up in the 200s in Manhattan only had service every hour) and such ridiculous plot contrivances about an underage cab driver that I actually found it unreadable and stopped midway through.  Even his literary agent begged him to fix the errors, but Fitzgerald refused.

The first story in the collection (The IOU) was decent and was recently (and belatedly) published by The New Yorker.  The second was improbable but at least readable.  I personally didn't care for the title story (due to the over-the-top sexual magnetism of one of the characters), but it was reasonably well written and some people will like it.  And that's about it.  The rest are basically a mess.  So this is one for Fitzgerald fanatics only, and even then I would only borrow it from the library.

In about a week or two, I'll get to Mordecai Richler's The Street, which is a slim volume of stories set in Montreal's St. Urbain neighbourhood, with Duddy Kravitz as the most notorious resident.

[BillF]

Cooper's last novel, still in very much the same style as Scenes from Provincial Life, but set in a very changed world.

[rostasi]

[jlhoots]

Douglas Preston: The Lost City Of The Monkey God

[ghost of miles]

[ejp626]

Closing in on Pride and Prejudice.  While it may be somewhat heretical, I definitely preferred Sense and Sensibility, in large part because I preferred the secondary characters.  Emily Bennet's younger sisters are a bunch of annoying simpletons.  Also, for a man who didn't care much for his wife, Mr. Bennet sure had a lot of children, though I suppose they were desperately trying for a male heir. 

After this, a bunch of short stories from R.K. Narayan (Lawley Road and An Astrologer's Day) and probably The Guide as well.

 

 

[jlhoots]

Timothy Hallinan: Fools' River

[jazzbo]

Just started

[ejp626]

I'm nearly done with Bove's A Singular Man.  Too long for what it is, sort of a nothing burger.  It's about a man, dependent on others for charity most of his life, who marries far above his station, but the happy couple never gets their share of the family fortune.  While he is "singular" in that he doesn't really rail against fate or go around begging for help (like the self-indulgent Tommy from Seize the Day), he also does little in the way of work.  For instance, he seems to give up a job in advertising without any kind of a back-up plan.  I'm kind of allergic to Bove's characters and their way of thinking.  (I really detested the main character of A Man Who Knows; here I am more indifferent.)  I probably ought to just stop reading him.

Another odd novel about a dissolute character who doesn't really want to work is English, August: An Indian Story by Upamanyu Chatterjee.  The main character is a young man who has won a position with IAS, but seems to want to do nothing but laze around all day smoking weed and occasionally reading Marcus Aurelius.  There is a lot here about the absurdities of trying to govern India through a civil service that is thoroughly corrupt, but it is still a novel centered on a callow young man, and the narrative/plot doesn't do much to challenge his self-centered view.

After this, I am changing it up and reading Death by Black Hole by Neil DeGrasse Tyson.  I picked up an autographed copy at the Hayden Planetarium on my last visit to NYC.

Then Gerard Reve's The Evenings, which was only recently translated into English.  I think it is somewhat in the same vein as the other novels I just read, but perhaps I will like it more.  Or I may just be fooling myself.