Remember, remember, to read this November

Finished Terry Moore's Strangers in Paradise, Volume 3, last night and I'm beginning Volume 4.

Getting into Maureen McHugh's Nekropolis, a fascinating tale of genetic manipulation in an imagined futuristic Morocco. Very much in the spirit of The Handmaid's Tale in terms of capturing the quotidian everyday aspects of life. This book is anti-space opera in scope and storyline. I would deign to call it a "literary novel in sci-fi clothing" like some professional reviewers have done, but I'd be afraid of opening up a Pandora's Box of Stupid from that worn out false dichotomy no one -- at least no one with any damn taste and functioning frontal lobes -- takes seriously anymore.

Read Craig Nova's THE CONSTANT HEART yesterday. Quite good but the metaphors were somewhat heavy. Definitely a page-turner, though.

With a trout fly on the cover, I'll have to read that. Nova is always heavy on the metaphors, but I forgive him. Actually haven't read him since The Universal Donor.

I'm almost done with Good Offices by Evelio Rosero, which will be followed by Alfa Romeo 1300 and Other Miracles by Fabio Bartolomei.

#3 Nova's latest is gripping...but, yeah, we get the astronomy reference, no need to repeat it (again and again).

The most blatantly clumsy writer in the metaphor department has got to be David Adams Richards. How that guy has managed to secure his place on the Can-Lit pantheon is a baffling mystery to yers truly. Yet one more example of what's wrong with the "national literature" being socially engineered in our home and native land.

On the other hand DAR is also able to write quite beautifully -- although I find his early work (e.g. Blood Ties) unreadable.

Don't get me started on "Atlantic" writers....

Oh, yes, just thinking about "regional" writing makes my blood boil. This country's cultural poobahs like to cherry-pick authors/works that they feel best define the fabric of this country, speaking to the "Canadian identity" (whatever the fuck that is). So they go scrounging around, identifying writers from the various parts of Canada who meet their points system and adhere to their checklist, pluck said authors from obscurity, holding them up as the latest examples of the fine writing their in-bred, circle-jerking little system is producing.

It's sickening.

7: Is it that time of year already?

Winter's just starting, Cliff. Save some of that anger for February. :-)

When it comes to Canadian "culture", my reservoirs of bile are literally infinite.

"Never before have so few fucked it up for so many..."

7: Sounds very much like Scotland. Whenever you have government involved in literature, this is what happens. It's the downside of the government supporting the arts.

8: It is indeed that time of year again. Cliff gets very frustrated when progress stalls on his NaNoWriMo project.

Evil, A.J. Just plain eeeee-vil.

11: But is it the Star Wars spec script or the Avengers film novelization?

On something of a reading tear of late.

Yesterday I finished William Goyen's ARCADIO.

Absolutely STELLAR use of voice, pitch perfect. The narrator is a hermaphrodite from East Texas, half-Mexican, and the entire tale is told in an amazing dialect that grants an exotic point of view without alienating the reader (not this reader anyway).

This was the last reading copy in the Saskatchewan library system. A collection of Goyen's short stories also earns that honor. A stunningly talented author, on a slow slide to obsolescence.

But I have a hunch Monsieur Goyen is going to be one of those scribes re-discovered by places like the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS' imprint. An author's author, creator of timeless tales, flawlessly executed.

A piece on Goyen:

http://markzipoli.blogspot.ca/2011/08/remembering-william-goyen-1915-1983.html

PARIS REVIEW interview (he sounds like a lovely, lovely man):

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3637/the-art-of-fiction-no-63-william-g...

Currently reading Offshore. So far, zzzzzz.....

'Also reading Saki. Now I know why I dropped my edition of Perelman like a hot stone. There's corn, and then there's wit.

Still up to my ears in research, I am reading Arming and Disarming: A History of Gun Control in Canada, which I think is somehow snob-worthy because it's the first book on the topic. Just published, hot off the press.

Been far too busy, and in a bit of a reading slump, but am currently enjoying Something Wicked This Way Comes. Bradbury definitely has his finger on the pulse of whatever it is that terrifies me.

My favorite Bradbury.

Reading John Varley's new book SLOW APOCALYPSE.

It's gripping but I still get a sense of a major talent slumming it with an end-of-the-world thriller. He should be setting his sights higher. This is, after all, the man who wrote one of the 5 finest SF novels of the past quarter century, STEEL BEACH.

Finished Rushdie's Satanic Verses, for the second time... I'm about Rushdie-d out.

So of course I start Adam Levin's massive The Instructions which so far has been quite good.

I finally finished reading My century. Surely one of the greatest memoires from the last century.

Two thirds into American Gods. I thought this was supposed to be a fun book.

So AJ, have you learned anything really surprising about gun control? Or will I have to read your latest book/article to find out. :)

Started re-reading 1984 in prep for teaching it in my English V class. The first 20 or 30 pages of that are just perfect.

#22--AMERICAN GODS just seemed like a Stephen King novel under a different pseudonym. Didn't impress me much.

Geoff: that Orwell fella was something, wasn't he?

I'm trying to finish MISS ME WHEN I'M GONE. It's taking me way too long because it's boring me.

This month I'd also like to read two of the books stacked and waiting for me: BROKEN HARBOR and an ARC of THE INTERCEPT: a Jeremy Fisk novel by Dick Wolf, which librarything.com doesn't list because it isn't out yet.

25: American Gods was OK, but for me, it didn't withstand the hype. Gaiman's fandom oversold it by a tad. I was much more impressed with his Sandman series.

Reading Nekropolis by Maureen McHugh, enjoying it immensely.

I enjoyed American Gods, but I agree that Sandman is far better.

So DeLillo's Libra - not bad so far, but kind of dry when it's not focused on Oswald.

23: One finds interesting historical nuggets. I had learned from a paper that the author sent me that John A. MacDonald, first PM of Canada, considered that our constitution granted a right to keep and bear arms -- to the well-to-do only, of course. This is very interesting for obscure reasons concerning Supreme Court decisions and Canadian legal history, which no one in their right mind cares about.

But my chief interest here is how the history informs (or misinforms) the current culture war.

You'll have to wait a couple years for all the details.....

Reading Jim Harrison's THE ROAD HOME.

Has this guy EVER written a bad book? He's a wonder, he is.

Yes, Cliff, Orwell's pretty sharp. Recently read a book of his essays that I loved too.

Reading Ike's Bluff: President Eisenhower's Secret Battle to Save the World. I like to read something presidential leading up to the elections. I had little appreciation for how close we came to nuclear war in the 1950s on so many occasions. On day 8 with no power at home on Long Island.......lots of time to read in front of the fireplace!

Talking about Orwell, I rather enjoyed Burmese Days a few months ago. Yes, it did feel have that "first novel" thing to it, but Orwell was such a sharp observer.

As for American Gods - I have to agree it was something of a let down. I discovered something strange with Gaiman - his novels are actually better as audiobooks, especially since he often reads them himself (and when he doesn't - like with Anansi Boys, the audiobooks are still very good. And so I stopped getting him in print.

30: "It is easy to forget that in the main we die only seven times more slowly than our dogs."

With an opening line like that you can't go wrong, unless the reader is a cat person.

Terrific book. It's dragging somewhat as I approach the end but Harrison's writing is so intoxicating, miles beyond the vast majority of his colleagues, I'll forgive him almost anything.

Reading DAYS OF DESTRUCTION, DAYS OF REVOLT (Chris Hedges & Joe Sacco). Text accompanied by line drawings, some comics--the whole concept built around areas of America that have been destroyed by the depredations of capitalism. Pine Ridge, South Dakota...Camden, New Jersey...Welch, West Virginia...

Surprised me. I expected a shallow, "graphic novel" treatment of poverty, social inequity but the authors conducted interviews at the various locales and let the people speak for themselves. It isn't quite LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN but it's moving and damn harrowing.

Browsing the essays of Glittering Images by Camille Paglia and Inventing the Enemy by Umberto Eco. Eco has a great pastiche-style essay of negative reviews of Ulysses by the Italian fascist press.

Also, Nekropolis continues to delight. A polar opposite of Excession, in terms of scope and style, but still really damn good.

Yesterday I finished Alfa Romeo 1300 and Other Miracles, which was fantastic. Next up is Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides.

The Instructions is a pretty great read so far. It's awfully reminiscent of Infinite Jest in some ways - the length, the footnotes, the school setting - but it's a much easier and breezier read. (Plus, the protagonist is a nine-year-old with a Messiah complex, instead of a stoner tennis player losing his game.) I may be missing some of the finer points of theology throughout this book (a Hebraic scholar I am not), but the characters are intelligently written and the plot seems like it might build in intensity to a gripping climax. (The 'warning' before the book starts really piques my curiosity.)

I'll give you further impressions once I'm about halfway through, but if you're in the mood for an enormous book, I can give this a preemptive recommendation.

FINALLY finished Anathem. There is a LOT packed into that book, and I got bogged down in several places. Maybe my expectations were too high, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought. Amazing worldbuilding, but I just couldn't get into the characters. Not enough depth.

I finished Something Wicked This Way Comes and it was marvelous. Can't believe this is only the second Bradbury I've read - the first being Fahrenheit 451 many years ago. I've been meaning to reread that one, but can't seem to find a copy anywhere. Hm.

Then quickly knocked over Ready Player One which was good fun, although I did occasionally feel a bit pedantic thinking "but that's not 80s culture, that came out in 1993...".

Now reading Spirit House for bookgroup. Early days, but I've got a good feeling about it.

Always meant to get around to Joseph Roth's fiction, after admiring his journalism/essays: Report from a Parisian Paradise and The Wandering Jews. Finally picked up The Radetzky March, wallowing in the twilight of the Hapsburgs.

Supposed to be reading Libra bu Don DeLillo but am making headway with A Piece of My Heart by Richard Ford instead. And The Warmth of Other Suns as well. Happily, as it turns out, as both are great.

>17 wookiebender: Bradbury-wise, Ive only read Dandelion Wine and was really mixed about it. I'm well aware that I need to read Fahrenheit 451 before I die, or turn 40. It was here, amongst the snobs, that I first heard of that book!

I'm reading The Nausea but now that you posted a thread with 'remember', I just recalled I gotta finish reading Kurt Vonnegut's Look at the birdie. I love his short stories, so I like to read them slowly to savor them... but at the same time, I have a TBR pile the size of the Everest waiting, and only one lifetime to get through it. *sigh*

>40 drmamm:
I certainly agree. The first half of Anathem, which mostly deals with worldbuilding is terrific. When Stephenson sits down to actually DO something with that world, it comes out rather flat.

In progress: DEAD CITIES by Mike Davis. Essays on lost places and economic sacrifice zones. Depressing, but interesting reading.

Finished 1984. Great stuff.

Reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet for a book club that met to discuss it yesterday ... I'm a bit behind, and I did get spoilers. :(

My pick for this club is coming up soon and I am agonizing over it, as usual. My last choice, Adam Foulds' The Quickening Maze, didn't go over so well ... not that that is a great big deal -- some of the best discussions have come about over books we haven't particularly liked.

I have a sure-to-be-disappointed desire to please people, I guess.

I love this book. I'm thinking about Cloud Atlas, but hope I won't be disappointed because I loved The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

I'm reading The Treasury of Spanish Love Short stories in Spanish and English. The first story was quite dreadful - from the 1500s with a translation almost as old but even more dreadful. The other stories are better.

I'm alternating it with Outside Rules: Short Stories about Nonconformist youth. It's a YA anthology, but with some unusual author choices. Wally Lamb for YA??? As for the nonconformity, the two stories I've read so far have typical teen protags. They aren't bad stories, but I'm feeling like I was lured in with false promises.

@49

In re: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, I think I am liking it quite a bit more than my book club cohorts did. Mitchell is exceedingly skilled, and pulls off a lot of amazing things ... and I am less than 150 pages in ...

I have long wanted to read Cloud Atlas.

Black Swan Green is fantastic too!

Mitchell rocks. I still need to read number9dream, though.

number9dream isn't bad, Ghostwritten is silly and not very good, Black Swan Green he manages the voice really well but structurally it's a disappointment after the earlier two, Cloud Atlas also has good control of voice but the sf in it is based on hoary old clichés. I've not read The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet yet.

But if you like Cloud Atlas, you should definitely give Girl Reading a go. I think it's the better of the two books.

ghostwritten started off well, I liked the earlier sequences, but when it got to the Irish physicist it went downhill rapidly, gobbledegook science and hoary AI tropes.

I'm on my first reread of Titus Groan since I first read it at 17. Amazed by how much more I enjoy and understand it this time around.

Also finally got my hands on Zone One, which so far is just Our Scrapbook of the Zombie Apocalypse. I'm already a little weary of how eager Whitehead is to be cynical about every aspect of modern life. Yeah yeah, mindless (zombie) consumption, materialism, we get it.

Waiting for The Fountain Overflows and Ladders to Fire to come in the mail, both of which I'm very excited for.

I thought Black Swan Green was a great little book - you're right that he has the voice nailed down, but I also liked the idea of a small-scale little book in comparison to Cloud Atlas. He's great at the big-scale stuff, but equally deft at writing a bilsdungroman about a kid in Thatcher-era Britain.

Just got Joe Abercrombie's Red Country - one of my favorite fantasy novelists writing a western-inspired standalone. Loved his previous books, and he seems to get better and better with each book.

The Fountain Overflows is one of those compelling books. I went on and read the sequels, published after West's death, though they aren't as good.
I liked Black Swan Green very much also. I think my problem with Cloud Atlas was that I'm not a big reader of the genres (sf, thriller) that he's trying to pastiche. It just didn't do much for me, although I could see it was quite an achievement.

Reviewed Shine Shine Shine. Disappointing. See here.

Started William Trevor's Selected Stories.

I have been reading a lot of Trevor lately, mainly the more recent novels, which is all my library has. I like him, though I sometimes find that the endings don't have the payoff they're supposed to have. However, he's really supposed to be a master of the short story.

Finished my re-read of THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE.

Book was much better than I remembered and very atypical of Philip K. Dick in that it seemed more nuanced, some nice, subtle characterizations among the multi-ethnic cast of characters. The book is an oddity in the PKD canon--different and more literate than most of his work.

> 61

Could be because the source material was the I Ching, not VALIS.

Good point.

Finished off Finding a Form. Exceptional. Sometimes exhausting but there was always a payoff to even the most abstruse meditations and the prose style was simply magnificent. I'm exceedingly curious as to whether his style and intellectual rigour can translate from the essay form to the fiction form and remain successful.

Now I'm properly immersed in Balthazar, which is just as beautiful and just as crushingly sad as Justine was.

Almost done with the Hamlet essays so I'm slowly getting my reading pile back under control.

Reading a luvly collection of essays called PULPHEAD. All you lovers of creative non-fiction take note, this one's a gem and sports a blurb from another recent enthusiasm, Wells Tower.

Currently about a quarter of the way into The Hydrogen Sonata. I'd forgotten how wordy Banks is...

Just got that one from the library...dang, I was looking forward to it. But Monsieur Banks should employ a ruthless editor, it would be good for him. His imagination takes over and he can't hold himself back, the words just flow...

66: Banks is wordy like PG Wodehouse ... in the best possible way.

67: And Banks is closer to Burgess and not Beckett, and his editor probably knows that. To disrupt that word-river would be a crime against literature. Granted, Banks has had some duds, but Excession gives him a Lifetime Pass in my book. I'd really love to see him do a vampire romance novel and then knock the genre completely off its pegs, like he did with the tropes of classic space opera. The same way Joss Whedon turned the Last Girl slasher genre inside out and upside down with "Cabin in the Woods."

I don't think he's wordy in the best possible way, I think it's a flaw in his writing. Too verbose, too much detail, it gets in the way of the story. He needs someone looking over his shoulder saying "lovely bit of world-building, lad, but you've totally destroyed your narrative momentum".

That sounds like fallacious reasoning. That implies verbosity slows down narrative momentum. And given Banks's penchant for non-linear narrative, it might be yet another way he's messing with the genre. (Full disclosure: I've only read one book by Banks. I need to read more to make a more accurate value judgment.) But like you've said before, the particular style should be in service of a particular story. Banks is part of the literary heritage of Joyce and Alexander Theroux, verbal maximalists, word-drunk scribes of densely packed prose. Banks is not Beckett and I think his stories would suffer if he had to put in that Procrustean bed.

Karl,

Saying one good book gives an author a lifetime pass sounds like fallacious reasoning too. If Ian and Cliff have read several of his books and have a basis of comparison, and you have only read one so don't, maybe their aesthetic response to his verbose style is not so off.

I've read books where the verbosity definitely did slow the momentum, and other books where it carried it. Verbosity itself does not mean the person is using it in a masterful way. And all of us who have the bad fortune to work for managers who use bureaucratese know that overly verbose language can sometimes obfuscate rather than clarify.

71: That's why I stated I only read one of his books. And I also admitted that Banks probably wrote some duds, like any writer given to being prolific. Then again, I'm a reader who enjoys dense, verbose prose. Living in the Era of Austerity is bad enough. I don't want that mentality to bleed into my pleasure reading too. Plus, we keep speaking in generalizations, which also seems counterproductive. "Every book should have X characteristics." Not every book I crack open needs to be as slim and spartan as a straight-edge punk with anorexia.

65 - I read Pulphead last year. Sullivan is fantastic -- and he hails from Kentucky.

Yes, PULPHEAD is really wonderful. Every essay is a gem, whether I'm interested in the subject or not.

Began reading Squinting Over Water by Mary Kennedy Eastham. Excellent stuff. Like Joyce Carol Oates stories set in sunny LA.

The last few essays on Hamlet promise to be a struggle. Somewhere between the mid-sixties and the mid-eighties literary criticism took a nosedive where clarity was concerned. What's all this stuff about Hamlet "materializing the word?" Shakespeare wasn't God, last time I checked.

Balthazar, on the other hand, continues in fine form. It's a joy to read something so finely wrought and to find in it not merely intellectual pleasure at its craftsmanship, but also an incredible resonance. It is crushingly sad in most places. I was not expecting an emotional read when I started the Quartet and I'm greatly surprised by how heavy it has turned out to be. That just makes it better, of course. I like books that can wring some emotion out of me.

76: What's all this stuff about Hamlet "materializing the word?" Shakespeare wasn't God, last time I checked. Just don't tell Harold Bloom that, especially since he wrote Hamlet: Poem Unlimited

@76&77 You mean he isn't God??? You've rocked my cosmos. ;)

78: Nope, that title would go to the late Charleton Heston Still, who needs God when they is a Time Lord sporting a bow tie?

Yes, I'll put my faith in bow ties.

Read and reviewed an early reviewer book from LT called The Last of the Bird People. Still plowing through Debt and Our Mutual Friend, sort of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction.

Lots of literary fiction on sale today only as Kindle deals for cyber monday, including most of Durrell's works. I have my eyes on The Man who Loved Children, which I've had on my wishlist a long time.

Finished The Hydrogen Sonata. It was not the return to form it was promised to be. Spent the entire book waiting for the twist, only to be sorely disappointed. Then read The Portrait by the excellent Iain Pears, in which the twist was not exactly hard to figure out, but the story was put together so well it didn't matter.

I'm really enjoying William Trevor's short stories. He's one of those writers who make me wonder what I'm doing mucking around in fiction.

My review of The Hydrogen Sonata is here.

83: I really love Iain Pears. I read The Dream of Scipio when I was laid up this summer and thought it was very thought provoking.

86: And I'm most of the way through An Instance of the Fingerpost. Clearly we all have a taste for Pears.

I loved that one, too. I also like his cute art history detective series, though they are not nearly as ambitious as the two stand alone novels we mentioned above.

#85--based on your critique, I may have to give the latest Banks a miss...at least for now. So many other good books requiring my attention.

I think you gave HYDROGEN SONATA a fair shake--I really haven't been blown away by Banks in some time. EXCESSION and some of the early Culture novels are wonderful (and THE WASP FACTORY simply magnificent), but in recent years I've found his work meandering, overlong and sometimes outright dull.

#88 I have his latest book, Stone's Fall, on the TBR as well.

89: I would recommend Nekropolis by Maureen McHugh. It's the polar opposite of epic space opera, it's more in line with Handmaid's Tale in terms of capturing the everyday lives of characters. Still, very well written.