June, 2012: The summmer reading season officially begins

Ladies and gentlemen, to your to-be-read piles and...

GO!

Wow, it's been almost a year since I posted in LibraryThing boards...school does that to you.

I'm almost done with The Planets by Sergio Chejfec. Mixed opinions. Next up is a YA read, the fifth of the Obernewtyn series by Isobelle Carmody, and I'm trying to read L'Étranger in French.

Welcome back!

Began Blood's a Rover by James Ellroy. I'm divided on his use of those rapid-fire mini-sentences, but his dialogue is damn bloody goodness. Hard-boiled talk put through a Mamet-ian verbal crucible.

There's a summer reading season? Alas, work is overwhelming, so all these seasons tend to blend.

I'm still plodding through Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Grapes of Wrath. Read it many years ago, and liked it then. I'm hoping it's just as good this time round.

Finished Spengler's Meaning of Numbers, which, other than the mathematics (and the Greek) was really quite interesting, linking up abstruse concepts into a cohesive statement which was mostly above my head but no less worthy for that.

Also am over the halfway point in The Rainbow. Brilliant. I think I already said that. Heavy-handed yet delicate. Quite a unique book and very moving. More Lawrence is absolutely on the queue.

I actually read Sadness of the Samurai, and early reviewer book, last week when it was still May, but I just posted a review today. Long story short, I thought this was a really great novel. I highly recommend it. I don't have anything major in mind for reading right now, though I have a couple chapters left of Titus Alone, the final Gormenghast book, and will be working on those.

Re-reading Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression. Also, The Iliad. And a collection of non-fiction by Al Purdy, No Other Country.

Which translation of THE ILIAD?

Chapman.

I just finished The Investigation by Philippe Claudel (can't find the touchstone) and posted a review for Early Reviewers. Mixed opinions about this one, too.

Re-read Alec Guinness's last journals, POSITIVELY FINAL APPEARANCE. Guinness was quite the curmudgeon and hated all the "Star Wars" notoriety, appalled that people were seeing the film 50-100 times.

12: Just got it today also via Early Reviewers. The comparisons to Beckett and Kafka have me interested. I'll see if it's merely a rehash of said writers or a new twist.

I should be done with The Rainbow in a week or so. Excellent book. A truly classic text that compels without recourse to plot or even a central character. People get married and raise the kids, incidents are few and far between, and yet the language is beautiful enough to carry the whole book and the characters are some of the most vivid I've encountered.

And the next chapter of Spengler is apparently going to be the physiognomy of world-history....

Wow. I forgot how much I really love Little, Big.... and how much I want to live in Edgewood.

Make sure you drop Monsieur Crowley a line c/o his blog and tell him so. I think he's neglected these days and that's a crime.

http://crowleycrow.livejournal.com/

After this reread, I'm definitely planning to search out more of his stuff. I'm sure he's tired of people swooning over Little Big, but how many people give him props on Aegypt?

#15 I started The White Peacock yesterday. Very clumsy writing. A first-person narrative in which parts of the story are described when the narrator is not present. But there are flashes of Lawrence brilliance in some of the descriptive prose about the countryside.

I'm on to ORANGE SUNSHINE, the true story of how a bunch of freaks called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love turned on the entire nation. They became major distributors of LSD and pot in the late Sixties and a whacked out buncha dudes they were too.

I'm now in the midst of News from Nowhere by William Morris and the anthology The End of the World, edited by Michael Kelahan.

Reading a few books at the moment...a couple of re-reads, actually: Atlas Shrugged, which is going about as well as it did the first time through (((sarcasm))), and Treasure Island, which I'm re-reading because I am considering teaching it in school next semester. I'm also working on Marabou Stork Nightmares by Irvine Welsh, a VERY creatively written novel, but lacking, a bit, on stirring any real emotions for the reader.

I'm a big Welsh fan...although his last couple of books haven't been stellar.

22: If you teach creative writing, you can always use Atlas Shrugged as the go-to counterexample for how to write a novel. Atlas Shrugged is the Fifty Shades of Grey for the Anticommunist Eisenhower Set, but with trains and vaguely Nazi-esque industrialist heroes, except that the latter is better written and mercifully shorter.

Arming the Luftwaffe is endlessly fascinating. Inter-party squabbling, technological advancements, slave labor. "The V-2 was probably the first modern weapon that killed more people in its production phase than in combat." Just think about that for a moment.

Blood's a Rover is tough, jagged, and gritty. The prose is whittled down to a Beckett-Mamet-like dagger and then thrust into the reader's eye socket. The words have a violence and hatred to them that's damn near physical. And Ellroy really gets into the psychotic brains of the Lunatic Right during the dreaded summer of 68.

Oh god ... I hang my head in shame. I am reading John R. Lott, Jr.: More Guns, Less Crime.

In my defence, I plead professional obligation.

Just finished another memoir by Bernard Cooper, THE BILL FROM MY FATHER.

Wonderful, no surprise this guy was awarded a bleedin' Guggenheim...

The Orphanmaster by Jean Zimmerman; I picked it up in the hopes that there would be some good historical bits, and there are so far. The murder part is a bit gruesome and disturbing, though.

I'll also be starting She by H. Rider Haggard as soon as I get a chance.

I started reading Tropic of Chaos which is really, really grim reading.

My favorite kind of reading.

Finished, in a couple of sittings, Dennis Lehane's MOONLIGHT MILE, which appears to be the last Kenzie/Gennaro book. A page-turner and the ending was better than expected. Sometimes Lehane adds one or two too many twists to the knot but this time he restrained himself.

29: I'll have to make a point to read some Lehane. I have a couple Kenzie/Gennaro books. Should take a whack at them.

Blood's a Rover continues to be dark, grim, and darkly comic. It reads like a photo-negative of a Pynchon epic, focusing on the criminals and sociopaths riding the festering racist circuit feeding off paranoia, limitless wealth, and conspiracy-theory lunacy. J. Edgar Hoover gloating over the MLK and RFK assassinations and Howard Hughes wanting to buy Las Vegas to make it safe for hygienic white people.

The Kenzie/Gennaro books are fun. Recommended.

Just finished Waiting for the Barbarians. Not the novel I thought it was going to be. Not the kind of novel I was looking for. Very powerful though.

Are all of Coetzee's novels about arid grueling constipated situations with no solution? I need something laxative now.

'Finally finished Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a spoofy spin on the New Testament.

I've started Stoner. O Pioneers! meets Good bye, Mr. Chips.

Mejix: I've been wanting to read Waiting for the Barbarians for a couple years now! I've heard it referred to as a dystopia; is that true?

I guess it is a kind of dystopia. I hadn't thought about it that way because the focus is on a moral conflict and not on the wonderment. But yes it is an "imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives."

Just finished Novelties and Souvenirs, by John Crowley. It was a short story collection, so I liked some stories more than others. My favorite three (in order) were "Snow," "Great Work of Time," and "Exogamy." I think Crowley was taking some pretty heavy drugs when he wrote "Blue," lol. I still can't figure that one out.

Mulling my options for my next book...

Paging through Megan Prelinger's ANOTHER SCIENCE FICTION, mouth agape. It's a beautiful edition, boasting vintage ads from the Space Age, how that generation envisioned the future to come.

Ian, do you have this one? I nabbed ANOTHER SCIENCE FICTION via inter-library loan but definitely intend to seek out my own personal copy. It's a must-have for space nuts.

Am reading Light between Oceans at the moment . Up to Part 3 and I think I can predict what is going to happen next.

Cliff, Not heard of that one. Will have to keep an eye open for it.

You'll love it. Hope you can get a copy at a decent price. If not, drop me a line, I'll have a look for you on this side of the Big Pond.

Love to get my hands on this "space age" book too. Just added to my list:

http://www.amazon.ca/Yesterdays-Tomorrows-Visions-American-Future/dp/0801853990

That looks pretty cool too. Have you see this - http://annakrentz.blogspot.co.at/2012/06/america-of-1960.html ?

Wow, those scale models blow my mind. You Brits used to be masterful at building realistic miniatures, Derek Meddings and that bunch. Another lost art since the advent of CGI.

25: Are you familiar with the Deltoid website which is run by Tim Lambert? One of the things he has done is practically devoted his life to debunking Lott and his data.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/

(I searched the website on "lott" and returned lots of results which are quite interesting - Lott sounds like quite the piece of work)
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid?s=lott

44. Yes, I'm familiar with Tim Lambert. I've also read most of the pro- and anti-Lott research. Lambert covers the bases quite well for people who don't want to read all those papers. Amazingly, with Lott thoroughly debunked by 2004, he put out a third edition of his book in 2010.

Lott is an interesting guy. The great question is whether he is (a) a stubborn man who shows poor judgment but genuinely believes his results, or (b) a complete fraud. I lean towards (a). He seems completely in thrall to the power of his own assumptions.

For example, he ran a regression to determine if right-to-carry laws were related to an increase in accidental shootings, and found no statistically significant increase -- but he did find a statistically significant 9.9% increase in accidental deaths from non-firearms causes, showing that something is wrong with his model. Instead of realizing that there is a problem in his model, he accepts the result. A fraud would have fixed the strange numbers first.

Finished off The Ministry of Special Cases and followed on the Latin American theme with Bolano's delightful The Secret of Evil. Just picked up Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior.

45: More of those "____ of ___" titles.

Blood's a Rover continues to be awesome.

45: I think true believers, who prefer to double down on their belief system rather than adjust their thinking to accommodate facts, are even scarier than outright frauds.

After finishing Crowley's magnum opus, I turn back to Wolf Hall... hopefully it can ensnare me this time around.

Completed DREAM MACHINE, a look at the literary and visual work of Brion Gysin.

Beautiful volume with lots of reproductions of Gysin's work, including a number of his collaborations with William S. Burroughs.

48: plowing through Chapter 9 (added in the 2nd edition, 2000) and Chapter 10 (added in the 3rd edition, 2010), I now lean increasingly towards (b), although perhaps he found a route from point (a) to point (b) over the years.

He makes statements in Chapter 10 that are flat-out dishonest. It's quite surprising, because the lies and half-truths are obvious to anyone who knows the literature and the controversies. Clearly, his intended audience at this point was Fox News viewers, not his peers. The book at this point discredits itself.

Finished Journey to the End of the Night during my two weeks as a chaperone for a high-school service trip in Peru. (Some nice juxtapositions and frequent ironies there.) The last 50 pages or so weren't, in my opinion, up to snuff, but what a great book.

Need to finish Desert Solitaire now. Also started The Omnivore's Dilemma this morning.

Reading Graham Robb's PARISIANS. I really have to get to Paris one day--and Robb is a fantastic guide, a real Francophile. If you haven't read Robb's biography of Rimbaud, you don't know what you're missing.

(Welcome back from Peru, Geoff. Hope you managed to enjoy yourself in the midst of trying to keep tabs on a bunch of hyper-active teenagers.)

Has anyone here ever read Richard Farina's Been Down So Long Looks Like Up to Me? I like the Farinas' music but I've been holding off on the book. I'm not much for those big sprawling way-out 60s tomes (not into drugs, and they tend to be sexist.) I'd appreciate any feedback if anyone's read it.

I'm about to start The Dolphin People by Torsten Krol. I picked it up this year at the post-holiday B&N online book sale because it looked interesting and I had gift card money to spend.

#54 Don't know much about Farina. See him kind of on the tale end of Beat, beginning of Hippiedom. THINK I've got the right guy.

53: Peru was amazing. But it's also nice to come back to toilets that flush.

#54: I remember reading a lot about Farina in the Dylan/Baez book Positively 4th Street. (A solid read, by the way, if you are interested in either of those folks, or the scene in general.) Farina was good friends with Tommy Pynchon back in the day, back when Tommy P was writing V. I've had Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me on my TBR list forever... maybe one day I'll track down a copy of it.

Yeah, I know this wasn't helpful.

54: According to the reviews on LT, if you are not into books about drug experiences and not wild about other Beat lit, you will not like it.

Okay, I finished The Rainbow and I won't be reading only one novel at a time again. By the end, I felt like I was eating the same meal over and over, excellent though the meal was. I need a stack of books on my reading pile or (ironically) reading starts to tire me out.

So I'm relaxing with Bob Dylan's Chronicles, which is just like Patti Smith's memoir in some respects - it's a name-dropping soup and a wonderful evocation of being a bohemian in New York City. Dylan, even as a young man, comes across as a walking antique. The insider's view on the folk scene is very much appreciated.

For the heavier stuff, Spengler is interesting again. Finally. One of his theories is that history cannot be studied scientifically, as it is a living structure and what it conveys should turn the reader of history into Walter Scott - at least if I read that right.... I haven't had any major disagreements with Spengler yet, except for his fear-mongering prophecy that in the world of the arts, "it's all downhill from here." I detest this argument. The forms may change but as long as there are ten thoughtful people left on the planet, art is never dead.

And also, I've bit the bullet and started The Alexandria Quartet. I'm about four pages into it. The set-up intrigues me and the writing is beautiful. Can't say any more than that just yet.

Started THE GREAT WAR & MODERN MEMORY by Paul Fussell. Exceptional, thus far.

54: I read Richard Fariña's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me back in the '60s and was impressed at the time, more with its "counterculturalness" than its literary merit. I suspect it would not hold up very well. (I recently read Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman, written at the same time, and had all I could do to get through the young-man-suffering-existential-angst.)

In 1962, Richard and Mimi lived on Avenue C and East 10th St, in the same old tenement building as a friend of mine. We indulged in stoned fantasies of running into them, or even better, Mimi's sister Joan Baez, on the stairs and inviting them to the endless party on the 4th floor but it never happened.

Speaking of the '60s, I'm about 100 pages into Kurt Andersen's new book, True Believers, for LTER and really annoyed by the incessant pop culture, capitalized references. It's like we won't get it without being reminded of every brand name, movie and song of the period. Has anyone else read it?

#60 I really need to start my reread of The Alexandria Quartet since it's Larry's centenary. Incidentally, my copy of Judith, a previously-unpublished Durrell novel, arrived yesterday. Limited edition. Not signed, obviously.

Was it a pretty pricey item? Limited edition, special occasion...Ian, Larry Durrell thanks you (from beyond the grave).

No, not especially - £17.50, plus £3.30 p&p. Though if I had been in London for the centenary goings-on, I could have picked it up myself and not paid the p&p.

Oh, heck, that's dirt cheap for a limited edition. Good on the publisher for not marking it up to ridiculous proportions.

Finished The Omnivore's Dilemma. It doesn't know what it wants to be (a denunciation of current foodways, a justification of meat-eating, an apologia pro vita sua) and so doesn't do any of those with particular force. But I'm going to use it in my English III class, where it should raise some interesting discussion points.

Working on I Burn Paris, which is a tough read (too much time annotating!), and trying to work through the Graywolf "Art of..." series.

The only justification I need for meat-eating is the smell of barbecuing beef on a late summer afternoon. As long as that scent is in the air, I'll never be a vegetarian, boys and girls...

Now reading Armed and Considered Dangerous: A Survey of Felons and their Firearms by Wright & Rossi, which is quite fascinating. Results of a large survey of convicted criminals in the US, inquiring into their habits re carrying and using weapons.

Also, curious to find fictional expressions of the nonsense in Grossman's On Killing, I read two novels by W.E.B. Griffin. The correspondence is quite amazing. It is as if Grossman, lacking the skills to write fiction, decided to write fiction instead. In the same vein, now reading Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy. The Grossman archetype appears before you even get to page one, in his acknowledgments.

I am sure my posting rights in this group will shortly be revoked.

I think the torture you're inflicting on yourself with Clancy et al is punishment enough, A.J.

For a writer, he'd make a very good military analyst.

I'm a leftie gun nut so, personally, I love hearing about firearms and crime.

All the more reason to get me some serious killin' power. Where's ma Magnum?

69: Part of my dissatisfaction with the book is that Pollan wants it both ways: he wants to enjoy the guilt of funding the American meat-eating/producing machine, but he also wants to eat meat. The parts of the book where he argues out the ethics of eating animals are the most intellectually sloppy in the book.

72: You mean he argues in favor of eating animals? I figure as a meat eater I am just having to deal with the guilt. Like Cliff, I just plain love meat and find it unthinkable to give it up, though I know about the carbon footprint and all that.

72,73: I'm more with Anthony Bourdain and his rather simplistic reasoning: animals are here to be tasty and provide warm fur. But if you ever watch any of his shows, you'll see someone who really, really doesn't like the whole slaughtering process.

For me, so long as the thing doesn't have its name on the way to market, I have no issue with that.

I'm also like Patton Oswalt when it comes to meat, because "every time you order a steak, a hippie's hacky-sack falls into the gutter."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kM_xDjhkOU4

Geez, am I the only abstainer? I was raised vegetarian, so I don't have any desire for meat. I love fish, but avians (past the egg stage) and mammals are a whole other thing. Also, I don't think I'd eat any animal at all if I actually had to kill and process it myself.

Geoff, I didn't think his issue was so much with eating meat as with the travesty that our agriculture and cattle industry have become. I've never considered becoming vegetarian (what Cliff said), but this book left me wondering what the hell I should eat.

58 - I did read Positively 4th Street which is what got me interested in Farina in the first place. However, I have limited patience, as I said, with self-indulgent 60s books. The Beats are kind of a college phase I can't go back to...

75 - I'm a vegeterian, too, though married to a meat eater and frankly not interested in arguing with other people about what they should eat.

Wolf Hall is very, very good. I've already gone and reserved a copy of the sequel from the library. Hopefully I'll see that within a few months...

I also started Charles Dickens's Bleak House. After struggling with a bank for over a month about a short sale, Jarndyce and Jarndyce seems a lot less silly...

I'm 50 pages into Green Mansions by W.H. Hudson and The Bay of Foxes by Sheila Kohler and enjoying them both.

Just started The Counterfeiters by Gide. Halfway through Chronic City by Lethem. Nibbling on a bunch of other stuff including, once again, A Book of Luminous Things.

Haha, I hear ya, although, I am really looking forward to Skagboys, another sequel (of sorts) to Trainspotting. Welsh has both hit and missed with me. Still a fan, though.

Finished The White Peacock last night. Was surprised at how lovely parts of it are. And, it has to be said, the dialect used throughout reminds me of my childhood - I'm originally from Nottinghamshire and was born no more than 15 miles from DH Lawrence's birthplace.

73-76: Yes, Pollan's main complaint isn't with eating meat per se (though he spends an awful lot of tortured time discussing the moral dimensions of doing so, including a few pages on whether animals can suffer in a way we would recognize), but with what he calls modern "industrial" meat production, which all of his evidence (and all the evidence of available to common sense) suggests is brutal, unhealthy for both people and the animals, and terrible for the environment. However, he neither urges the reader to stop purchasing 'industrial' meat nor implies that he himself plans to stop doing so.

In the interest of disclosure (if anyone cares), I don't eat meat, mainly for environmental reasons. (Pollan spends a substantial amount of time demonstrating that what we are in essence eating when we eat industrially produced meat is petroleum, a lot of that being the petroleum required to ineffeciently produce the subsidized corn to feed the animals.) But I also don't fuss at those who do.

The middle section of his book is set mostly at Polyface Farms, a site that provides a template for responsible meat-production and meat-eating that only the grumpiest vegetarian could condemn.

Blood's a Rover continues to be demented and fun.

My God, I am trapped in a Montreal hotel room with a Tom Clancy novel. Send help.

Re eating animals, I finished the book I mentioned some time ago (last month? the month before?) on the flight down to Montreal, Guy de la Valdene's The Fragrance of Grass. Here's a book by a lifelong hunter, who continues to hunt, that brims with outrage at our destruction of animals and of the habitats they need to survive -- and is suffused, also, with a regret for the author's own past excesses. "The consequences of carrying a gun," says Valdene, "is measured in the silence of the birds I have shot."

Valdene doesn't participate in the obtuse, politically correct BS now in vogue whereby hunters are supposed to use words like "harvest"; instead, "killed" and "shot," short and forceful words that allow no obfuscation.

Re 75, if you have killed your own meal and cleaned it, and if you are a halfway thoughtful person, you cannot possibly sidestep your responsibility for your actions. Your footprint is neatly delineated by the wound channel through which the shotgun pellet pulls a bloodied feather, "the delirious passage through which what is quick and numinous becomes meat." (Thomas McGuane) Eating hot dogs is one way to disguise that fact, I suppose. Nevertheless, pheasant and mushrooms in brandy and cream remains irresistible, and I think morally superior to a hot dog.

Have just started The Sea, The Sea, Iris Murdoch.

I'm working my way through Molotov's Magic Lantern by Rachel Polonsky trying to savor it slowly like a great cognac. The winner of this year's Dolman Travel Book Award, the book is a piece of travel literature, but also so much more. A meditation on all things Russian, a history of Russian culture full of nuggets unknown to Russophiles such as I, and a travel book, too. I can't recommend it highly enough.

I finished Tropic of Chaos - boy that was depressing. The general way these types of book go (I have read several very good books about climate change) is: be afraid.... be more afraid.... be VERY afraid... look, it is already too late to do anything.... OK, here are some things you can do to change things! Be empowered! See you later. By the time they get to the "here is what should be done" you are so beaten down, depressed and hopeless that it really does not work for you. At least this is my experience.

I am reading some light fare now. I just finished the bestseller Making Rounds with Oscar which I thought was a very good book about what it is like to have dementia and die in a nursing home, which is the end of a goodly portion of us, with a cat thrown in there to make it more heartwarming and furry and stuff. It was good, though obviously written by someone who is not a professional writer.

I am now reading Captain Alatriste becuase I like silly swashbuckling adventure stories after reading about third world violence, mass starvation and displacement, and dying crazy and alone.

87 - I loved Molotov's Magic Lantern for the description, the feeling of being there in the Russian landscape, although one of the frequent criticisms I've heard is that the book is "disorganized." I didn't find that and was quite willing to follow Polonsky wherever she lead. I recommended it to my book club (which is me and two other people, one of whom is Russian.)

Finished that simple, lyrical, allegorical novella about your typical unattractive, stoic, simple, poverty-stricken Brazilian girl, The Hour of the Star. Nice.

'Almost done with those 97 chapters describing every living Chilean and Argentine - in 199 pages, In Patagonia.

@ #85: Can you get pheasant and mushrooms in brandy and cream at a ball game?

Depends how classy the ball game is. ;)

I need a break from all the recent non-fiction. Re-reading Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle.

#89 - I certainly can see why some might call Molotov's Magic Lantern disorganized. I prefer to think of it as an exercise in watching a brilliant mind move from topic to topic in a process of free association. It's like having a conversation - you never know where it will end up. One physical object (a book, a magic lantern) can bring forth a mixture of memory, learning and native intelligence. I've never read a book quite like it, but I'm impressed!

# 92: Well, maybe in a private box.

About halfway through The Investigation by Philippe Claudel, an Early Reviewer book. Very Kafkaesque so far, a darkly comical descent into a corporate bureaucracy.

Just started Twilight of the Elites. It is interesting and well-written, but I am not really sold on the idea that the current state of things in the US is so different than how elites have always maintained control in societies like ours.

96: "Elites" is such a slippery misleading term. When the Left talks about them, they are the moneyed 1%. When the Right talks about them, they are secular humanists, college professors, the Press, non-Christians, and Hollywood. I prefer the more sensible explanation, we're enslaved by the reptile-aliens via the Vatican and the Bilderberger Group. Makes perfect sense, at least to David Icke and glue-sniffers everywhere:

http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/magazine/15-11/st_best

I've always felt elite, even though I teeter on insolvency, have the genes of a gibbon and possess absolutely no power or influence.

Strange...

Reading Frankenstein for the 3rd or 4th time. Using it in my Eng. V-AP class next year.

Finished Wolf Hall - while a good read, I can't call it an all-time classic. Maybe once I finish the now-trilogy.

Started Bleak House and The History of Love.

Nearly done with Absalom, Absalom!. Over. Rated. (clap, clap, clap-clap-clap)

Finished Joe Lansdale's EDGE OF DARK WATER.

A book very much in the vein of Daniel Woodrell's WINTER'S BONE, though not as accomplished. Diverting; accompanied by adoring blurbs from longtime friends and associates of the author...

Who else blurbs books? I always find it a little amusing to read a blurb and then to see the writer of it personally thanked in the Acknowledgements for being the author's writing instructor/crititque group member/friend.

Read The Sorrows of Young Werther and am now reading Faust. For the first time I really understand why people compare it to Shakespeare. Have a copy of the Marlowe play too and may read it as well.
Incidentally, my copy of Faust is so old it has a blurb on it from Stephen Spender!

>98 CliffBurns: Cliff; I understand and share that sentiment...

Finished The Sea, The Sea, my first and likely to be only Iris Murdoch. Published in 1978, from the characters' ages I calculated it was set in 1968, read like it took place in 1958. It won the Booker, but I couldn't see why.

Reading The Last Policeman for review and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (hello? touchstones? why isn't the book by L. Frank Baum the first thing to pop up?) because, somehow, in my 5th-grade Oz spree I read the other 13 books but not that one. The brand-new library didn't have it. Go figure.

My last book of June, GUARDIAN OF NIGHT by Tony Daniel.

O-kay science fiction but I enjoyed his previous novels far more; METAPLANETARY and SUPERLUMINAL are solid SF efforts. This one seems more like a crowd-pleaser to me, lots of familiar touchstones. Neat gadgetry, war with a savage alien species, humanity's survival at stake...but I can't get over the feeling that Daniel, in the final analysis, is merely transferring the plot of THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER into space.

101,

Over-rated? The Ulysses of the South??

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/magazine/how-william-faulkner-tackled-race-and...

108: Yeah, I thought my comment would be more incendiary (in this group) than it turned out to be. I do (now finished with the novel, having read the essay you linked to) still believe that the novel is overrated. The problem with that (very intelligent) essay is that its overall appraisal has to be positive because it's the introduction to the new Modern Library edition of the novel. My essential complaint is that the prose is an absolute hysterical mess: uncontrolled, repetitive, often sloppy, frequently obfuscatory, and (despite what might seem true at first) much easier to execute than prose required to make some decisions in the name of restraint. I also found the characters to be closer to caricatures. Put those two complaints together and you've got a novel with insurmountable problems.

And that, is also, exactly why I am afraid of Virginia Woolf...

"uncontrolled, repetitive, often sloppy, frequently obfuscatory..."

You mean, like it was written by a drunk?

111: Sounds like the typical Rush Limbaugh broadcast, at least when that human parade float isn't coked out on painkillers.

111: Hey, now, some of us drunks exhibit praiseworthy concision.

112: 'human parade float'--nice.

I just don't get it. Why is there always so much talk about "summer reading season" at the beginning of every summer? People who read read all year, not just in the summer.

The only exception I can think of is when I was in college. I did so much reading for school, I had time to read a book for pleasure only during summer break.

It's a Canadian expression. In the winter, we're too busy shovelling snow and repairing our igloos.

115: And gorging on poutine and maple syrup, what with your Communist health care system, hockey season, and pop antichrist Gordon Lightfoot Wait ... what was the question?

And don't forget cold ones and donuts and Southern fare (eg., Michigan Red Hots)...