August, 2012--readings and commentary (Attack that to-be-read pile!)

Started Michael Chabon's first book, MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH, and re-reading Zinn's PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.

The Passage of Power by Robert Caro.
Spy in the Ruins by Christopher Bernard.

And occasional poems by Alfred Goldbarth

I am planning to start reading to read Terry Moore's epic Strangers in Paradise

I shall have the complete Caro/LBJ series one fine day (and if the creek don't rise)...

I'm slowly making my way through Earthly Powers, which is good stuff, but heavy. (No, seriously, the book weighs at least 2 pounds.) In addition, I'm rereading Catcher in the Rye and The Brothers Karamazov.

So right when I'm in the middle of 2 giant books, I get Bring Up the Bodies and Dogs of God from
the library.... oh well. Time to power through Catcher before my brother-in-law shows up to watch Breaking Bad...

Made it through 10 pages of Swamplandia!, but that's all: it's deeply bad, a compendium of all the ways contemporary fiction can be bad--and it was a Pulitzer finalist! Eek!

After I threw Swamplandia into the sell-back-at-first-opportunity pile, I picked Desert Solitaire back up and was reminded that language doesn't have to be mistreated in a book.

5: yeah let's hear it for Abbey. I really would like to re-read The Monkey Wrench Gang now that I just finished Catch-22. Trading one rollicking absurdity for another.

I am nearly done with Earthly Powers, truly a wonderful book with one of the most likeable protagonists I've ever met. Chamberk at #5 must have the same edition that I do... heavy indeed!

Trying to finish The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Nibling on The Subject Tonight is Love poems by Hafiz, and Step Across This Line, essays by Salman Rushdie. Rushdie is a hardcore fan of The Wizard of Oz. Who would've thunk?

Gone to the Forest by Katie Kitamura, which comes out on Tuesday, is up next. I also need to get back to Earthly Powers...I enjoyed the first two hundred or so pages, but my attention is winding down past the mid-way point.

5: Swamplandia! Yuck. By page 50 I had had more than enough of the swamp. I finished it but couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. Maybe the critics were seduced by the exotic setting.

I started Earthly Powers with my 30-year-old mass market paperback but the yellow pages, the tiny print and the leading got to me. So I went to the library and now have the brick edition. It's definitely worth a second reading, especially so many years later.

9: For critics, anything that isn't New England academics committing adultery can be read as "exotic."

9, 10: "Exotic": But the exoticism is so faked here, so immediately and deeply unbelievable. The whole angle and concept is underlaid by sloppy, lazy thought. It's pure trash from word one.

Just got J.G. Ballard's collected stories in the mail!

A great book that can also be used for self-defense. Bugger must weigh about five pounds.

The Lost Scrapbook by Evan Dara, originally published by FC2 after winning one of their prizes, selected by William T. Vollmann. I'm unsure if I've read it before, but if I have, I certainly don't remember. It's 476 pages of nonstop unattributed dialogue, about halfway through atm. It's reminiscent JR by William Gaddis, which is also told in unattributed dialogue, though Dara doesn't use as many characters per scene as Gaddis does. The characters have fewer actions and more introspections than JR. Anyway, it's silly to compare the two, since JR is about chaos whereas this book seems to be about levels of order. (This novel has more structure than most of the online reviews I've seen give it credit.) Narratives within narratives about science, music, society, politics, art, and the relationships between them... all told through the character's speeches. Lovely, so far. Thought-provoking, but not (at least not yet) moving.

Just started the joy that is Rings of Saturn - with a few bricks at various stages of beginning 2666, the tunnel and the instructions.

2666 and The Tunnel at the same time? Isn't that the literary equivalent of crossing the streams?

I have just finished reading Six Memos for the Next Millenium by Calvino and working on if on a winter's night a traveler... Also by Calvino. He is the only Oulipo author who is stocked in the BN's down here. Perhaps stocking Perec or Queneau would take up valuable space from the face out display for Paterson in the P's and for you know who a few shelves below in the R's

Perec, Queneau, Calvino...bless you for mentioning three absolute superstars.

Always wanted to get my hands on the OULIPO COMPENDIUM by Harry Matthews but so far...

I read If on a winter's night recently. Interestingly enough given the subject I had terrible trouble getting my hands on the book. The library catalog claimed to have two copies on the shelves and both were missing -- something I'd never experienced before. Some kind of cosmic joke I guess.
I just finished Lonelyhearts, a bio of Nathanael West and his wife, who was known for being the subject of the book and movie My Sister Eileen. West sounds a little like a Richard Farina type, wild, obnoxious, insecure, but he matures in the course of the book. I hadn't realized that he was a screenwriter for Republic Pictures, and one of the few successful screenwriters, of the many who went to Hollywood in that era. Also he died the same weekend as F. Scott Fitzgerald. His death went completely unnoticed, by the way -- all the headlines were about his wife being killed.

I took a break from Updike's Rabbit series to read Setting Free the Bears, John Irving's first novel (starts amazing slow, but gets more interesting as he fills out Siggy's back story). Also, a fun book if you're familiar with Vienna. Just finished.....now on to Rabbit at Rest.

I read my first Calvino, Invisible Cities, a couple of weeks ago. I was sleep-deprived to a delusional degree while waiting in a doctor's office for my grandma. I was on the third-floor of a building, one of the many UCSF medical centers on Mt. Parnassus. UCSF's windows are undoubtedly the best perching points to see San Francisco from. The panorama spans from Ocean beach on the west side of town all the way to the financial district on the east side. From there, I could see all of the places called Golden Gate: the bridge, the park, and the strait. Anyway, I don't know if it was the view or the sleep-deprivation which made me feel giddy, but the novel really came alive. I know neither is a factor to enjoy a book, and both could contribute to ruining the experience of one, but this time was different. The view allowed me to hold the text against an actual city, and the sleep-deprivation enabled me to make these wild connections between the two. It was probably temporary madness, but I couldn't stop thinking that the descriptions of cities in the novel were actually descriptions of novels which already existed, or if they didn't exist, then Calvino wanted to see them written. But I really ought to reread Invisible Cities. I would like to enjoy it with the same mind that I read other novels with.

Finished off Junky and am now working my way through the appendix section. Very enlightening and interesting. I shall be doing more reading on drugs and the "war" on drugs somewhere down the line.

"It's not a war on drugs, it's a war on personal freedom." So sayeth Bill Hicks:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqgojRd1W4U

Hicks is accurate about the scare-tactics. The penalties for marijuana are particularly insane, considering that it's a natural growing plant. But then, no more insane than the "war" itself, which has been going on for decades and has gotten...what results? It's been about as successful as the "war on poverty," I guess.

21: If you like Miss Lonelyhearts, check out Laura Warholic

Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey: 5 stars.

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee, which I was sent for free, unrequired summer reading by the Honors College. So I waited until I was traveling to the college to read it. I'm not finding it terribly interesting. The farther back in history the author goes, the more I'm interested, but otherwise it doesn't seem very organized.

Rabbit, Run. My first Updike. His prose and imagery are remarkable, but I'm not sure about the story yet. I'm only about 40 pages in, though.

Almost halfway done with The Passage of Power by Robert Caro.

>>28 drmamm:: I decided to read Updike's Rabbit series and am currently about halfway through the last one, Rabbit at Rest. I've enjoyed them......entertaining writing and an interesting reflection of our culture from the early 1960s through the 1980s.

Glad I'm not the only Swamplandia! hater. Everyone at my library is obsessed with it. Good call on Setting Free the Bears, also!

I personally liked Swamplandia!, but I can see why it would put others off.

Like a fool, I got a ton of books from the library (mostly history stuff) when I'm still bogged down in Earthly Powers and The Brothers Karamazov. (Not that they're bad books, but it's a little hard to juggle them with other books!)

Out of the library books, I'm currently about halfway through Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies. Much like Wolf Hall, it's entertaining to read and well-written, but I don't think I'm going to come away from it raving about it. It's just a good read about a well-known story from a new and interesting perspective.

40 pages in to stntango. Great claustrophobic and damp atmosphere but waiting for plot to kick in

Almost done with Road to Wigan Pier. It's not just about coal miners. Old George is on a tear, and writing brilliantly about class differences, socialism, socialists, socialist literature, food, personal hygiene, unemplyment, imperialism, automation, war, etc.

He's Mark Twain with eloquence and without the hyperbole.

I'm 80 something pages into Les Miserables and still not sure if I'm going to read it. We'll see.

I'm still bogged down with Arming the Luftwaffe by Daniel Uziel. Fascinating subject matter, but, yeesh, dry and dense as hardtack. Not a pop history by any stretch, but a wonderful resource for a WW2 historian or someone interested in how mass production is effected during wartime.

Currently reading Midnight's Children and Scorecasting. Just finished The Talented Mr. Ripley and Goodbye to all That, which is a very good autobiography, especially for those interested in the WWI.

Finished off Junky's appendix-work and am really enjoying Justine. I shall be done rather soon and am looking forward to Balthazar.

On page 190 of The Princess Bride.

I love all the meta messages in the Princess Bride. It was so funny. I hope you are enjoying it as much as I did.

Brains: A Zombie Memoir: 3 stars. Good fun. Annoying only when it tried to mean too much.

Starting a fun book called Ghosting, about a woman who took a job with a flashy English publisher and ended up ghost-writing everything he put his name on: a novel, love letters to his wife, etc.

Got a fair amount of reading done over the weekend (as I sit here in the recliner with my foot up)...

I read Ho! for the Black Hills which was an early reviewer book that I found pretty darned entertaining. It was a collection of letters that "Captain Jack" Crawford had sent to the Omaha Bee in the 1870s during the gold rush and Sioux War in the Black Hills. I also reviewed it.

I also read The dream of Scipio and absolutely loved it.

Taking a break now with some mysteries.

Read A.N. Wilson's The Elizabethans over the weekend. Really a goodoverview of an era I always found very confusing, taking in culture as well as politics.

I'm enjoying Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, which I'm reading for class.

Starting Strangers in Paradise, Volume 2, by Terry Moore

Moore elevates the otherwise disreputable genre of romance. The visual storytelling is on par with Cerebus, minus Sim's theocratic misogynist crackpottery. Moore spun his own version of the superhero story with Echo, also a work of genius.

A.N. Wilson's raves have persuaded me to read The Fairie Queene. I'm also trying to finish a knitting project. When I get bored with the FQ, I knit and when I get bored with knitting I pick up the Fairie Queene again. Last night I did about 15 rows. Book I is very puzzling...mostly jousting.

Other books I'll be reading throughout this semester: The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, Life in the Ancient Near East, and Classic Fairy Tales (Norton Critical Edition).

Started Attack of the Copula Spiders by Douglas Glover. I liked the chapter about Bernhard (which a Snob recently, kindly sent me a link to), but the first chapter of the book, "How to Write a Novel," is somewhat of a disappointment. Lots of paint-by-numbers stuff that makes me want to do anything but write.

Starting a book about gender-based brain studies by Cordelia Fine.

All this XIX century flamboyant grandiose rhetoric at Les Miserables is funny, touching and a little bit sad. Also makes you wonder how our current rhetoric will look in the future. (To the cave people, the mutants or our alien overlords.)

Finished Rabbit, Run. Wow! Talk about depressing stories! That kind of story takes someone as skilled as Updike to keep it from sinking into a farce. The only character I "liked" was the old lady that Harry worked for. I mean, Updike created some rich, deep characters - it's just that they all acted like horse's asses.

Pathetic!

With all the editing I've been doing this month, I've managed to read exactly ONE book. Howard Zinn's PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is a big book, granted, but I have to do better than that if I'm going to hang out with literary snobs and feel worthy of holding my head up in their presence.

I humbly apologize to one and all.

No pressure Cliff.

It's a shame. I get involved in these projects of mine and when I come up for air, three weeks or a month have passed and all I have to show for it are sore fingers and a ringing skull. And, maybe, a few pages of serviceable prose.

And, meanwhile, that TBR pile gets taller and taller...

Finished a good volume of poetry, Philip Levine's NEWS OF THE WORLD.

Affable and deceptively simple.

I just started in on Hamlet. I've seen enough editions that it's no longer hard to read, therefore the time is ripe. I've got the Norton Critical Edition. So far, I'm finding Shakespeare's lack of stage direction absolutely fascinating. In fact, I believe this is a big part of Shakespeare's evergreen appeal and longevity (at least in terms of stage and film) - he's easy to adapt because Elsinor doesn't exist on the page. He's the exact opposite of a playwright like Eugene O'Neill; O'Neill kept a rigid control over his plays, describing sets and actions in minute detail. Reinventing his plays would probably be tricky. Shakespeare obviously not so much. I heard some Scandinavians even cast a tomato in the role of Hamlet once.

56: Mamet and Beckett were also very rigid in their stage directions. I remember a news story about a version of Waiting for Godot done entirely with women that the Beckett Estate threatened to shut down. (Probably a topic that would make good meat for a different discussion thread.) I consider Beckett to be one of the "good guys," but the Beckett Estate behaves in a heavy-handed dictatorial manner vaguely reminiscent of the Nazis he fought against. An author's estate shouldn't be a Ministry of Official Interpretation, since things like "living theater" exist on a different level as a performance. (As opposed to Beckett's novels and poetry; although putting Beckett's novels next to Philip K. Dick's on a bookstore shelf might raise some eyebrows.)

"putting Beckett's novels next to Philip K. Dick's on a bookstore shelf might raise some eyebrows..."

Karl, you've described my bookshelves to a "T".

Reading DUSK AND OTHER STORIES by James Salter.

Boy, can this guy write...

I have finished Justine. And I reviewed it. I am now a raving Lawrence Durrell fan. If the rest of the quartet is equal to the first volume, then it is one of the pinnacles of 20th Century literature, Durrell should have won the Nobel and Ulysses and Proust have this as their competition when I sit down to read them. The man was a genius. Time reading him was well-spent indeed.

60: I started reading your review, but had to stop once you started talking about Melissa, as it looked like you were giving too much away. I might have been wrong, but can't take the risk as I do want to read this someday.

Hmmm, did I give too much away? It was a long review but I tried to speak only of plot points that are established early on in the novel or very minor. However, best not read it if it worries you. Read the book instead. :)

62: I'm very good at forgetting things (just ask my wife), so I probably wasn't running much of a risk anyway.

Started an interesting sci fi book, BLUEPRINTS OF THE AFTERLIFE by Ryan Boudinot. A near future where ecological disasters have taken their toll, nanotechnology threatens and Big Pharma uses obese people to grow tissue and organs.

Bizarre so far, but it keeps the pages turning.

60: James Joyce and Proust also didn't win Nobel Prizes. Both probably weren't sufficiently "Swedish enough" for those insular Viking shmucks. I read somewhere that the Nobel committee avoided giving Durrell the Prize because his writing had too much sex in it. At this point, I equate the Nobel and the Pulitzer for their chronic ineptitude and walleyed prejudices.

Nearly done with The Passage to Power by Caro. Then it'll be a lengthy review on CCLaP.

Almost done with A Spy in the Ruins by Christopher Bernard. An excellent experimental novel for those into that sort of thing.

I set my nonfiction aside for now. Debt: The first five thousand years and The End of Evolution are kinda depressing and I need cheering up.

So right now I am reading Kavalier and Clay in addition to More than Somewhat, a collection of Damon Runyon stories. I am really enjoying K&C. I think I need to read that Yiddish Policemen Union book as well at some point. Chabon is a very funny writer.

Book two of The Fairie Queene has picked up a little and gotten more complex. Not as good as Dante, or perhaps more like the Dante of Paradiso than Inferno. One of the things I stumble over is the continual use of pronouns without antecedents, line after line. Spenser hardly ever gives actual names and it becomes confusing as to who is smiting whom.
Spenser's women are intriguing, too. Una faints a lot and weeps buckets of tears but you begin to suspect she has more common sense than most of the men.

64: I've been wanting to read that. I haven't seen it around on the Internet much, other than running across it on GoodReads.

I'm reading through the second and third Tarzan books, and I'll be starting Gravity's Rainbow and Postsingular soon for semester-long Honors College informal reading groups (my main reason for doing Honors College - book groups passing out free books).

Finished BLUEPRINTS OF THE AFTERLIFE and found it quite good--to the extent that I'll keep an eye out for Mr. Boudinot's two previous releases, MISCONCEPTION and THE LITTLEST HITLER.

I liked the satirical elements of BLUEPRINTS, the author's ability to imagineer a bizarre, post-apocalyptic future; it meandered a bit but an ambitious, surreal, amusing novel.

Anna, glad you're reading K&C. It's one of my all-time favorites. I'm looking forward to Telegraph Avenue coming out next month.

About halfway through ROADSIDE PICNIC by Arkady and Boris Strugastsky. A recent translation (Chicago Review Press)--film buffs will know this is the source novel for Tarkovsky's "Stalker" (as well as a video game, my sons tells me).

Enjoying the book, which is giving me more insights and background only hinted at in the movie.

Sticking with "Stalker"-related material, I'm reading Geoff Dyer's ZONA (picked up via inter-library loan).

The movie "Stalker" became something of an obsession for Dyer and while this lengthy essay/meditation meanders at times, I still find it involving and insightful.

I enjoyed the wonderful pictures in Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini

Colorful Realm: Japanese Bird-and-Flower Paintings by Ito Jakuchu. Extraordinary.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzhLVg4GKg8)

I've completely dropped off the Librarything radar this last month, due to the massive arts festival on my doorstep. Got review copies of Philida and Zoo Time which are both novels where good writing saves astonishingly unoriginal premises. Neither of them are classics for the ages, but both are worth a few hours of your time. Zoo Time made me laugh enough to forgive it all its faults, and Philida has some properly good passages. They both kept me away from the unstoppable juggernaut of Daniel Deronda which by the final few hundred pages has such complexity and richness I feel I've been spoiled. In fact, I probably have been spoiled.
I was lucky enought at the Edinburgh Book Festival to hear Alice Oswald recite her poem Memorial without notes, for an hour and a bit. That was wonderful. She held the room spellbound all the way through and I was so energised by it that on the way home at about half ten at nights I 'phoned a friend to read her bits from the poem and enthuse at her.

In the crepuscule of my house in the wake of Hurricane Isaac, I reread Jesus' Son and started rereading Woodcutters--comfort reading in my discomfort.

Hope your house was not damaged? Is everything OK?