Now reading...

[Matthew]

Robert Lowell: A Biography by Ian Hamilton.

I read a Lowell biography about 10 years ago, but don't recall if this was the one. Fascinating  - and disturbing - life. Loved the bit where he, briefly imprisoned as a conscientious objector, rubbed shoulders with the boss of Murder Inc, leading to a conversation something like this: "What are you in for?" "Killing people. What are you in for?" "Not killing people." Love his poetry and Life Studies sits on my bookshelf.

He did live an interesting life.  In America, once Lowell and Allen Ginsberg died, sad to say, the "public poet" disappeared from the US scene (one could also make a case for Maya Angelou), much to our loss.  With the passage of time, Lowell is becoming the 20th. Century American poet, the quality of his body of work is hard to beat, though Theodore Roethke has to be up there also.

[sonnyhill]

[BillF]

Robert Lowell: A Biography by Ian Hamilton.

I read a Lowell biography about 10 years ago, but don't recall if this was the one. Fascinating  - and disturbing - life. Loved the bit where he, briefly imprisoned as a conscientious objector, rubbed shoulders with the boss of Murder Inc, leading to a conversation something like this: "What are you in for?" "Killing people. What are you in for?" "Not killing people." Love his poetry and Life Studies sits on my bookshelf.

He did live an interesting life.  In America, once Lowell and Allen Ginsberg died, sad to say, the "public poet" disappeared from the US scene (one could also make a case for Maya Angelou), much to our loss.  With the passage of time, Lowell is becoming the 20th. Century American poet, the quality of his body of work is hard to beat, though Theodore Roethke has to be up there also.

Roethke is another I read and liked, though it's many years ago now.

[johnblitweiler]

In America Amiri Baraka and Jayne Cortez were "public poets" into the 21st century.  And nowadays Billy Collins and others.

[ejp626]

Just finished Irène Némirovsky's David Golder.  In some ways it is a funhouse mirror version of Silas Marner.  I thought it quite interesting.

I am struggling to get through Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question.  I might as well push on (about 100 pages left) but he leaves me absolutely cold as a reader.  I didn't see what the big fuss was about Kalooki Nights, and I don't think very highly of The Finkler Question.  This will definitely be the last Jacobson novel I attempt.

The next up after this is Machado De Assis's Epitaph of a Small Winner, which I have never read, despite it being a fairly short book.

[niels]

Fantastic book, one of my favorites from Orhan Pamuk!

[Michael Weiss]

Fittingly, almost looks like Peter Boyle on the cover.

Edited October 1, 2015 by Michael Weiss

[Leeway]

An old and still strange friend. 

[jlhoots]

Thomas Perry: Strip

[Larry Kart]

"The Three Musketeers" (in the translation that Lowell Blair did for Bantam Books about 25 years ago) -- so far it's like a runaway train, crazy fun. 

[BillF]

An old and still strange friend. 

Found this difficult to read - even when I had to read it at university. Didn't have that problem with Jane Eyre BTW. I like the cover illustration on that Penguin edition - something French from a British collection - Corot? Barbizon school?

[A Lark Ascending]

An old and still strange friend. 

Found this difficult to read - even when I had to read it at university. Didn't have that problem with Jane Eyre BTW. I like the cover illustration on that Penguin edition - something French from a British collection - Corot? Barbizon school?

I read it as 'light relief' in my last year at uni as finals were approaching (unbelievable as that may seem it was light relief compared with memorising the key points of Civil War era political pamphlets!).

Utterly haunted by it at the time. I'd read virtually no pre-20th C novels since school up to that point. I was so taken by it that it started me on Austin, the other Brontes, Elliot, Hardy etc over the next couple of years. Must re-read it. 

[Leeway]

An old and still strange friend. 

Found this difficult to read - even when I had to read it at university. Didn't have that problem with Jane Eyre BTW. I like the cover illustration on that Penguin edition - something French from a British collection - Corot? Barbizon school?

I read it as 'light relief' in my last year at uni as finals were approaching (unbelievable as that may seem it was light relief compared with memorising the key points of Civil War era political pamphlets!).

Utterly haunted by it at the time. I'd read virtually no pre-20th C novels since school up to that point. I was so taken by it that it started me on Austin, the other Brontes, Elliot, Hardy etc over the next couple of years. Must re-read it. 

The cover illustration is a detail from Corot's "Gust of Wind," in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. 

I agree that WH is a tougher read than JE. I'm re-reading Jane Eyre at the moment. 

[Matthew]

A Boy's Will by Robert Frost.  Frost's first book of poems.

[A Lark Ascending]

Waterstones to stop selling Kindle as book sales surge

 

[ejp626]

Waterstones to stop selling Kindle as book sales surge

 

To be honest, I have to agree with the sentiments in the comments that Waterstones was just complete rubbish at selling the things, since the management and staff are wedded to the idea that paper books are the only real books.  I'd say well over 90% of my reading is in the form of tangible books, but I don't pooh-pooh the idea of reading digital books, particularly given the awesomeness of Project Gutenberg.

I just wrapped up Muriel Spark's The Informed Air, which are mini-essays on how she became a writer, her literary preoccupations (mostly Proust and T.S. Eliot) and her reflections on religion, particularly the Book of Job.  This is definitely a book that almost everyone would only flip through once, so see if your library stocks it.

Still working my way through de Assis's Epitaph of a Small Winner.

[BillF]

A Boy's Will by Robert Frost.  Frost's first book of poems.

Frost was always a great favourite.

[mjazzg]

Laila Lalami - The Moor's Account

lots of good things written about this and Pullitzer and Booker prize nominations to add to the buzz. the idea of telling the story of Conquistadors from the perspective of one of their African slaves is interesting. The writing however won't flow for me. It's as if it's a translation which self-evidently it isn't. I'll persevere

[BillF]

 

Just got to the end of this 770-page tome! Liked it at first, but the larger-than-life sensationalist tone palled on me eventually. Was far more impressed by The Secret History which I read some years ago.

The third - and best - Franzen I've read, which as a 560-page contemporary American novel obviously invites comparison with Tartt's blockbuster. It was a relief after Tartt's verbal torrents to encounter a more measured prose style. And, unlike her, structure is all: a very complex narrative with occasionally perplexing shifts in time and voice, but all resolves eventually into a very satisfactory book. Very contemporary feel, particularly in the part played by the internet and a Snowden/Assange character. Recommended.

Edited October 12, 2015 by BillF

[Neal Pomea]

Pioneers of the Blues Revival, 2014, by Steven Cushing. Interviews with Pete Whelan, Sam Charters, Dick Waterman, Phil Spiro, Bob Koester, Dick Spottswood, Dave Evans, Gayle Wardlow, Chris Strachwitz etc.

Really good chapters with Spiro, Spottswood, and Evans, in particular.

[ejp626]

I'm just about done with Epitaph for a Small Winner.  I don't find it quite as engaging as his short stories, but it has its moments.  The general outlook on life expressed within is pretty bleak, and that is probably mostly what is troubling me.

I'm also just about done with Iris Owens' After Claude (NYRB).  I find the main character absolutely infuriating, actually a couple of notches past the annoyance I often felt at Ignatius in A Confederacy of Dunces.  I really look forward for terrible things to befall her, as it seems likely to transpire.  Actually she reminds me a bit of the "wild woman" who is just "misunderstood" also seen in Baker's Cassandra at the Wedding, but the narrator of After Claude has no redeeming qualities that I can see.  I can't wait to be through with this one.

[A Lark Ascending]

Finished this early in the week...

As good a military history book as I've read. Balances narrative and analysis perfectly. What make it is the use of eyewitness accounts that gives you a real sense of what it must have been like to be there. Never realised how gruesome it was - I always associate mass horror with the American Civil War and World War I. But the accounts gere of the squares just standing there to repel cavalry whilst the artillery pound into them chill the blood. And the complete lack of logistical organisation after the battle to deal with casualties with people lying out there five days later. Then you turn on the news and see Syria.

No, not the lot. 'King Lear' - first Shakespeare I've read for many a year. Extraordinary play. Not an easy volume to handle whilst lying on the couch but it was cheap! Hope to read a lot of these in the coming years. 

Reading too many books at once at present - the John Peel book, a thriller, the Shakespeare bio mentioned further up and this:

 

Really don't know what to make of this. The first 50 or so pages are really quite dull - a sort of history of LSD, the pre-60s American avant-garde, the Beats etc. Gets interesting once he gets round to the music. 

But suffers from that thing with so many books written by enthusiasts who haven't really based their writing on objective research. Projects his own prejudices onto the music and presents this as objective truth. So he decides that the reaction against psychedelia in the late 60s (The Band and all that) has been overrated and was as much game playing as the hippy era itself. Which I suspect is the case, but...

Can't work out his point - seems to want to see that popular culture from the 60s onwards owes everything to LSD. But I'm not sure if he is saying that.

Reminds me of another 'fan' book about British jazz from a few years back where a bunch of personal prejudices were stitched together as a history...though this one is more entertaining and isn't cursed by pseudo-sociology. This sort of thing might be fine as an internet blog, bulletin board exchange or pub debate. But putting it in printed form requires rather more discipline. 

Some atrocious factual errors too - can't believe he made these mistakes as he seems so knowledgeable about the music of the era. Get the impression it was the sort of thing we all do typing at speed but the errors were never picked up later - The Band as the backing group of 'Screaming Jay Hawkins?; a couple of other glaring ones I can't recall.

I was too young to have been aware of the 60s when they happened; imagine anyone who was there would be driven nuts by this book. I'm preparing to go nuts when I get to the 70s. But I will read on.     

  

[jazzbo]

Re-reading this tome. For me a fascinating work.

 

I'm still re-reading this one, with other material around it, and this book is making me reach into other books to verify and supplement what is here.

This is a dense seditious mofo of a book. Elements of it have ratified thoughts I have had during my years of research of the religions of the ancient world and the big picture it conveys is hard to refute and tables-turning. I've still weeks ahead in this tome, and in time will read its sequel. This is Alzheimer's prevention at its best (for me and my interests).

[Matthew]

Jack Kerouac: Road Novels -- 1957-1960.  Starting to reread Kerouac, which I haven't done in quite awhile.  This time around, I'm not getting the craziness, but a melancholy feeling of missed chances in life.

[mjazzg]

Marilynne Robinson - Lila

beautifully written first fifty pages.....hungry to finish but want to savour at the same time. i don't remember Gilead having quite such an immediate impact as good as that was

Finished this early in the week...

As good a military history book as I've read. Balances narrative and analysis perfectly. What make it is the use of eyewitness accounts that gives you a real sense of what it must have been like to be there. Never realised how gruesome it was - I always associate mass horror with the American Civil War and World War I. But the accounts gere of the squares just standing there to repel cavalry whilst the artillery pound into them chill the blood. And the complete lack of logistical organisation after the battle to deal with casualties with people lying out there five days later. Then you turn on the news and see Syria.

No, not the lot. 'King Lear' - first Shakespeare I've read for many a year. Extraordinary play. Not an easy volume to handle whilst lying on the couch but it was cheap! Hope to read a lot of these in the coming years. 

Reading too many books at once at present - the John Peel book, a thriller, the Shakespeare bio mentioned further up and this:

 

Really don't know what to make of this. The first 50 or so pages are really quite dull - a sort of history of LSD, the pre-60s American avant-garde, the Beats etc. Gets interesting once he gets round to the music. 

But suffers from that thing with so many books written by enthusiasts who haven't really based their writing on objective research. Projects his own prejudices onto the music and presents this as objective truth. So he decides that the reaction against psychedelia in the late 60s (The Band and all that) has been overrated and was as much game playing as the hippy era itself. Which I suspect is the case, but...

Can't work out his point - seems to want to see that popular culture from the 60s onwards owes everything to LSD. But I'm not sure if he is saying that.

Reminds me of another 'fan' book about British jazz from a few years back where a bunch of personal prejudices were stitched together as a history...though this one is more entertaining and isn't cursed by pseudo-sociology. This sort of thing might be fine as an internet blog, bulletin board exchange or pub debate. But putting it in printed form requires rather more discipline. 

Some atrocious factual errors too - can't believe he made these mistakes as he seems so knowledgeable about the music of the era. Get the impression it was the sort of thing we all do typing at speed but the errors were never picked up later - The Band as the backing group of 'Screaming Jay Hawkins?; a couple of other glaring ones I can't recall.

I was too young to have been aware of the 60s when they happened; imagine anyone who was there would be driven nuts by this book. I'm preparing to go nuts when I get to the 70s. But I will read on.     

  

are you retired or something? all this lazing about reading......