Now reading...

[paul secor]

10 hours ago, GA Russell said:

The Doomsters was the first of his that I read.  I enjoyed every one, but it wasn't too long before I forgot the plots of each because they seemed like the same book over and over!

I'm working my way back rereading his novels from last to first. The Doomsters was the first disappointment - except for The Ferguson Affair, which was not a Lew Archer book. I shall see if the earlier novels are disappointments.

There's much to be said about "the same book over and over", but I still enjoy reading them for their different quirks.

[jazzbo]

Yes, I really enjoyed McDonald's books, may need to re-read some soon. I'm doing the same thing this year with Philip K. Dick, re-reading his science fiction and non-science fiction novels. I love these books! They have shaped my brain.

[ejp626]

On 4/3/2016 at 4:34 AM, BillF said:

 

Faulkner can be daunting. I think in the age of modernism I was more prepared to put up with his stylistic difficulty. I don't think I would be now.

 

Where I get annoyed with Faulkner is that it seems at times he is being deliberately obscure and going on for several sentences with just "he" or occasionally "she" and it is sometimes impossible to unpick which characters are being referred to, particularly when he also jumps around in time in the middle of the paragraph.  There is some moment in Intruder in the Dust where this uncle knows that his sister-in-law is going to be mad at him and then this triggers a bit where he is probably thinking about his own mother being disappointed in him and then coming around.  So I can sort of see how he is trying to link things up, stream-of-consciousness-wise, but I honestly don't think the book would have been less enjoyable if he had been just a bit clearer about what is actually going on.

The plot of Intruder in the Dust is quite interesting, but yes it is pretty challenging to read.  My favorite Faulkner is perhaps not surprisingly one of his last novels and it is written in a much clearer style -- it is The Reivers.

[A Lark Ascending]

100 pages into this and very impressed - does exactly what I want, telling the story in considerable detail but clearly. I read a couple of short bios back in the 1970s (Blaukopf and Kennedy, I think) and then the huge first volume of the La Grange bio c. 1980. By the time volume 2 and 3 emerged in translation 20+ years later I'd forgotten the first volume and they were too expensive anyway.  

Edited April 6, 2016 by A Lark Ascending

[paul secor]

James Hanley: A Kingdom

A beautifully written book by one of my favorite authors

[ejp626]

I just wrapped up Highsmith's The Price of Salt.  I enjoyed it, though I do agree that it certainly doesn't succeed as a thriller.  I'm somewhat surprised that they turned it into a movie, and I wonder if they amped up the action during the road trip or not.

I just started Morley Callaghan's Such is My Beloved, which is about a young priest trying to reform two prostitutes.

After that, Molly Keane's final novel Queen Lear (now more commonly titled Loving and Giving).

[jazzbo]

[BillF]

1 hour ago, jazzbo said:

I really liked that one. Hope you do, too.

[jazzbo]

Yes, so far, it's very good.

[A Lark Ascending]

Only know the Tudors in outline so I've been working my way through them over the last few years. Edward VI's reign is normally passed over quickly, getting a mention for the swing to stronger Protestantism at best. Actually proved a period of considerable interest - the inevitable jockeying for power and influence with the expected falls from grace; fascinating social background of rural unrest tied in with enclosure; also interesting to see the stirrings of social conscience amongst some leaders, things I'd always associated with the mid-17thC.  And, I now know where Lady Jane Grey fits in! 

[jlhoots]

Timothy Hallinan: King Maybe

[HutchFan]

About 100 pages into this:

The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Bounty – by Caroline Alexander 

Picked this book up because I greatly enjoyed Alexander's The Endurance.  Like that book, The Bounty is a very entertaining mixture of adventure and history. 

[Brad]

 

Just finished this.  It's a superb book, a memoir by a young American, Eleanor Perenyi, in the 1930s who falls in love with a poor Hungarian Baron and they move to the old family estate in what is now, as a result of the break up of Austria-Hungary, Czechoslovakia.  She settles into a rural life and her description of the people and the surrounding Ruthenian region are wonderful; you feel you're sharing it with her.  Eventually that life is shattered by WW II and she has to leave, never to return to Hungary.

Another winner from NYRB Classics.

[BillF]

The perfect accompaniment to reading the novels!

[paul secor]

Tom Stoppard: Indian Ink

[medjuck]

I saw this in New York, then read the play.  They left out one line near the end: the one where someone talks abut cutting off the heads of the colonialists. I loved this play but I feel that way about pretty well all Stoppard. (I think Travesties is my favorite.)

[Larry Kart]

http://www.amazon.com/The-Patton-Papers-Martin-Blumenson/dp/0306807173/ref=pd_sim_sbs_14_1?ie=UTF8&dpID=514X8r1LJDL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL320_SR200%2C320_&refRID=0K65CR979N5YW452VFY8

 

Absolutely fascinating self-portrait (letter, diaries, etc.) of a grandiose military genius cum semi-psychopath. Fascinating too because it's all contemporaneous -- one knows what's going to happen next/how things are going to turn out in the near and long run, but Patton as he's writing of course does not. Some very harsh judgments of Eisenhower, Mark Clark, Montgomery, etc. Patton's bits and pieces of anti-Semitism at first seem to be of his time and place, but in Bavaria right after the war it's much more than that. Jewish DPs are "vermin," and he says that we should have left it to the Germans to finish them off.

[ejp626]

3 hours ago, medjuck said:

I saw this in New York, then read the play.  They left out one line near the end: the one where someone talks abut cutting off the heads of the colonialists. I loved this play but I feel that way about pretty well all Stoppard. (I think Travesties is my favorite.)

I haven't seen this one, though I've seen a lot of Stoppard.  I actually traveled to Montreal to catch Travesties, which I enjoyed greatly.  For me, my favorite is Arcadia, which is a simply incredible play.

Just starting Keane's Queen Lear.  The opening scene is this young girl running all around her parents' estate, checking up on what all the servants are doing.  It kind of reminds me a bit of Peake's Gormenghast actually.

[medjuck]

5 hours ago, ejp626 said:

I haven't seen this one, though I've seen a lot of Stoppard.  I actually traveled to Montreal to catch Travesties, which I enjoyed greatly.  For me, my favorite is Arcadia, which is a simply incredible play.

Just starting Keane's Queen Lear.  The opening scene is this young girl running all around her parents' estate, checking up on what all the servants are doing.  It kind of reminds me a bit of Peake's Gormenghast actually.

I forgot about Arcadia. Yes  It is a wonderful play.   

[Jazzmoose]

After reading the Faulkner stuff earlier, I had to pull The Sound and the Fury off the shelf one more time, mainly to see if I could figure out the second section a bit better.  (First section I've read too much-it was too fun to ignore.  The third is pointless; I'd just put it down and grab The Hamlet instead.  The fourth section tells me that Faulkner had too much power in the writer-editor relationship.  It's like having a Disney ending tacked onto Citizen Kane.)

[paul secor]

5 hours ago, medjuck said:

I forgot about Arcadia. Yes  It is a wonderful play.   

I've read a number of Stoppard's plays and enjoyed reading them, but I know that I miss subtleties (and sometimes more than that) by not seeing them performed.

[Leeway]

THE SMALL HOUSE AT ALLINGTON -1864- Anthony Trollope

I finally wrestled this baggy  monster into submission. Trollope can be frustrating. In a few pages he can shift from brilliant social scenes to trite and mawkish page-filler. That might be the problem when one write a certain number of words each day; some are bound to be bad. Apparently others esteem the book more highly; John Major cited it as his favorite novel. Anyway, it's the 5th volume in the Barsetshire Chronicles. I have one more to go to complete the series. 

[BillF]

3 hours ago, Leeway said:

THE SMALL HOUSE AT ALLINGTON -1864- Anthony Trollope

Apparently others esteem the book more highly; John Major cited it as his favorite novel. 

I wouldn't cite John Major as my favourite politician. 

[Larry Kart]

4 hours ago, Leeway said:

THE SMALL HOUSE AT ALLINGTON -1864- Anthony Trollope

I finally wrestled this baggy  monster into submission. Trollope can be frustrating. In a few pages he can shift from brilliant social scenes to trite and mawkish page-filler. That might be the problem when one write a certain number of words each day; some are bound to be bad. Apparently others esteem the book more highly; John Major cited it as his favorite novel. Anyway, it's the 5th volume in the Barsetshire Chronicles. I have one more to go to complete the series. 

"The Last Chronicle of Barset" is a killer, in the best sense. Mrs. Proudie! 

[A Lark Ascending]

Have four on the go at present...

The Jens Malte Fischer bio of Mahler mentioned previously which is excellent. Just got him to Leipzig. My, he was a right prig as a young man. 

This is suberb. Much of my formal study of history and then early teaching was in the 17th and 18thC so the Reformation was integral as background and its ideas central to those times. This quite dense but very readable survey put lots of disconnected bits together for me. Especially good on the ideas that fuelled the change.

 

Current novel - slowly working through this series. Should finish when I'm 80. The heroes back from their American adventures around the time of the 1812-14 war, about to set off for the Baltic.

This has had quite a bit of press coverage as an argument that 1971 was the greatest year in rock. Daft marketing premise and hides the fact that this is more than just a fluffy bit of fandom. Covers the year month by month linking the music with the social context. 1970-73 were probably my formative years with music (and still the period of rock music I use as a comfort zone) so it has obvious personal appeal. He's very good on how unformed much of the business still was then and how central listening to records was to young people then with few other alternatives (he's spot on when he comments how most teenagers/early adults just assumed TV was not for them...I went through most of the 70s almost completely ignoring it).

But he also reminds you of what was really prominent at the time rather than what subsequent revisionism has deemed significant. So early on he highlights the huge success of Carol King's 'Tapestry' (with suggestions as to why), a record that rarely figures highly in the standard histories of the time (most accounts would have you believe that everyone was listening to Iggy Pop). I remember it being hugely popular right through to my university years from 1970s. I hated the record (without having listened to it beyond the radio hits), probably for no other reason than its popularity. I very much like it now. An echo of a past I didn't actually experience. My, I was right prig as a young man.    

Edited April 20, 2016 by A Lark Ascending