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I actually have gotten the albums in my wish list to a small number, and I have planned to quit soon. I noticed that the site is quite revamped and now you download as a zip file rather than through the download manager. What is very interesting is that it used to be (years and years ago) you could download multiple times, but they stopped that. It seems to have come back now, so music I downloaded a long time ago is now available again. I will do a search to see if anything was lost (due to losing an external hard drive) and download again. And then I'll quit.

Qiu Miaojin Notes of a Crocodile (NYRB) My impressions were very negative. It was a boring, whiny tract, full of self-pity. I really can't understand why this was a cult book, other than she wrote openly about homosexuality at a time her culture was not receptive. And probably also because the author committed suicide, which always generates its own cult followers... Anyway, I wouldn't recommend this at all. I am now launching into Morley Callaghan's The Many Colored Coat. I am cautiously optimistic.

It was already too long, so I don't feel cheated...

I finished 1Q84. It had a few interesting moments, but certainly nothing that justified its length. In many ways, I consider the ending a cop-out. I am almost done with MacLennan's The Watch That Ends the Night. It's quite good. I personally like it far more than his Two Solitudes or Barometer Rising. It's mostly a love triangle with political overtones (one of the parties involved goes off to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War). While it is a very different (and perhaps wiser or more forgiving) book, there are a few interesting parallels to Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier (which I hope to reread this fall).

I read a bit about Moore's take on the character, that the James Bond myth was so over-the-top, since everyone knew he was a spy (even the dealers and bartenders) that you might as well treat it all as a lark. That makes sense to me, and I like most of the Bond films with Moore in them, though Moonraker is pretty terrible. I have absolutely no interest in the gritty, "realistic" films of the Daniel Craig era. That isn't Bond to me at all (it's basically just Jason Bourne), though of course many people lap them up.

I thought it was pretty interesting but at 1/3rd in, it switches from having elements of magic realism and the uncanny to a full-on fantasy novel with supernatural beings involved. At this point, I'll finish it, but I think it was a wrong turning point. (Also, how many times does he need to reference Orwell's 1984? -- it comes up over and over and over.) I just stumbled across Murakami's story "Town of Cats" in The New Yorker, which cleverly edits together some of the key events from 1Q84 and boils down 450 pages into 5 or 6! Now if he had just done that for the second half of the novel! After this, two Canadian novels: Callaghan's The Many Colored Coat and MacLennan's The Watch That Ends the Night.

I just read through Elise Partridge's The If Borderlands (NYRB Poetry), which includes all 3 of her published collections and a handful of unpublished poems. One of my favorites was "Alternate Histories" (originally published in The Exiles' Gallery): If they had straightened, not veered, if they'd caught the night ferry. If the Consul's clerk had replied, if west-running tracks had cleared. If she'd taken the hallway stairs. If he hadn't missed the warning while he whistled at tea. If they'd walked home late from the fair.

I got the email. It is sad, but the writing is definitely on the wall. My kids don't understand the point of CDs at all. The computers at work don't have CD-drives, so you have to convert the CDs to play them anyway, so it isn't that far to cut out the middle step and just go digital and streaming. Anyway, I have been eyeing the Beehive set for some time, and it is still in print, so I ordered it. But this will probably be the last time I order from Mosaic. Between the terrible exchange rate and the brutal shipping (and customs!) to get things to Canada, it just isn't worth it any longer. As a certain someone would put it -- Sad!

A Hologram for the King An interesting movie-version of the novel by Dave Eggers (which I haven't read). Among other things, it comments on globalisation and the hollowing out of manufacturing in the West. Like many consultants, we chased some big contract in the Middle East (though Bahrain, not Saudi Arabia) and in the end, we were more than happy when the deal fell through. The guy who is Tom Hanks' driver/guide in the film is definitely a highlight.

Apuleius's The Golden Ass After that, Murakami's 1Q84

Reading two books that are loosely linked through the hotel/motel theme: the epic I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita and Rick Moody's Hotels of North America. The latter is much shorter and is quite interesting in how the book is built up of reviews of hotels (or motels) where the reviewer stayed. The reviewer is an over-sharer, which is putting it mildly.

James Rosenquist, one of the last major figures from the Pop era, has passed away. I saw an interesting exhibit of his massive works on paper, which was quite nice. Also in 2003 or so, I saw the Rosenquist retrospective at the Guggenheim. Obit here: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/apr/01/james-rosenquist-pop-artist-f-111-dies-83

I've just finished Queneau's Zazie in the Metro. What a wild book. Still sort of fascinating that they even attempted to translate into English. I'm aware of the film version, but haven't decided if I will get around to watching it or not. Still reading quite a few short story collections with a few more on the way. Juan Rulfo's The Plain in Flames was good but I got a little tired of all the machismo of men killing other men, generally over no reason at all. It's the sort of book that if written by anybody else would cause tut-tuttings of how can you write about Mexicans in such a stereotypical manner... David Bezgozmis's Natasha and Other Stories. Worth a look. I thought the title story was excellent. I'm about to start Guy Vanderhaege's Daddy Lenin and Greg Hollingshead's The Roaring Girl.

For all the praise they got, I am finding the stories in Malamud's The Magic Barrel to be incredibly sour and often disappointing. I suppose the focus on people whose lives were circumscribed by poverty and prejudice (particularly against Jews) was a necessary corrective during the self-congratulatory Eisenhower years, but I am finding them depressing. Minstry's Family Matters is also depressing, though I was expecting that. I seem to be on a bit of a short story kick at the moment. I'm going to be working my way through Juan Rulfo's The Plain in Flames, Natasha by David Bezmozgis and Guy Vanderhaeghe's Daddy Lenin. I probably ought to read at least a few William Trevor and T.C. Boyle stories, but I'll hold off on them for a bit longer.

How is this? It looks promising, and I have it in my library queue.

I finally finished Absalom, Absalom! To be honest, it didn't seem worth the effort this time around. I like The Sound and the Fury considerably more, though my favorite Faulkner remains The Reivers. Definitely underwhelmed by Bright Magic, though I did like "Materialism: A Fable." Just wrapped up Juan Rulfo Pedro Páramo, which all seems to take place in a City of the Dead somewhere in Mexico. Tomorrow I launch into Rohinton Mistry's Family Matters.

Slowly making progress with Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! It's a fairly straight-forward story told in an incredibly convoluted fashion... Also, dipping into Alfred Doblin's Bright Magic (NYRB Classics), which is apparently the first time that Doblin's short stories have been collected in English. I have to admit they aren't doing a lot for me. The cover is nice, however.

I used to try to combine a stop at Dusty Groove with a peek at what was on at Corbett & Dempsey -- quite a cool little gallery.

It could be several places on the El, but it reminds me of underneath the El right by the Sheridan stop.

Just wrapped up Fontane's On Tangled Paths. I have to say, it is laughably conflict-free. (SPOILERS follow.) Aristocrat starts affair with seamstress. She tells him it is all wonderful, but she knows it won't last long. His family pressures him to marry a wealthy cousin. He does so, but every now and then pines for the girl he left behind. The end. I get that the novel was daring in its time, but everybody acts so sensibly and they all follow the roles/rules society expects and imposes upon them, that it is rather boring, I'm afraid. I have a bit more to go with Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, and then on to Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom.

I've never read any of his books, but back in the 1980s he had an occasional column at the back of Discover Magazine, which is where I was first introduced to his liars and truth tellers and other logic puzzlers. I think Martin Gardner inherited the space, or they traded off. That was a long time ago...

Finally got a bit further into Humphrey Clinker. I knew it was quite different from the other Smollett novels, but I had no idea just how different. The entire thing is an epistolary novel, so the plot can only be advanced through one person writing to another. Sometimes there are only one or two letter writers in these sorts of things, but in this case it is already close to 10. It may end up being fairly hard to keep track of everyone, but I'll see how it goes. After this, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom and then Fontane's On Tangled Paths.

Glad you liked it. I plan on rereading it, though not any time soon. I've just finished W.P. Kinsella's final work - Russian Dolls: Stories from the Breathing Castle. It's an odd work with 30 stories (many of them quite short) interspersed with the narrator (a somewhat fictionalized version of Kinsella) discussing his turbulent relationship with his girlfriend, whom he considers his Muse. The connecting sections are often a bit more interesting than the stories themselves, which tend to be in the magic realist vein (though no baseball stories at all...). I probably won't get around to it for quite a while, but there is another novel about a poet and how badly his wife reacts when she learns she isn't his sole Muse. This is The Astral by Kate Christensen. Has anyone actually read it? I decided that I didn't like the Raeburn translation of Ovid's Metamorphosis after all, and I'll just stick to Humphries's version. I'm just about done with my detour from my main reading list, though I will try to quickly wrap up Dino Buzzati's The Tartar Steppe, which was a bit of a Modernist classic in its day, but is on the obscure side now (though it is still in print). I should finally get back to H. Clinker maybe a bit later in the week.

RIP. Very sad news.

Slightly different question. I don't have a Kindle but the Kindle for PC program. I found, like most people, that it is very hard to know for sure what version of a book you are buying in the Kindle store (a lot of bait and switch particularly with older texts in the public domain). But if you get the proper versions from reputable publishers, there are some nice features. In particular, I have liked the ability to jump back and forth from the main text to the footnotes. Also, you can change the font size. This was particularly useful for the Penguin version of Juvenal's Satires. I am leaning towards getting the Penguin edition of Ovid's Metamorphosis this way since it is a case where the print edition is just absurdly long (due to using over-sized fonts). My question is whether it is possible to have unique font settings for each book in your library, or whether when you switch to a different book, you have to change the font back. I think it is the latter, but am not sure.