Now reading...

[paul secor]

Geoff Nicholson: The City Under the Skin

I've read a couple of other Nicholson novels which were ok, but this one wasn't worth the time I spent reading it.

[ejp626]

Geoff Nicholson: The City Under the Skin

I've read a couple of other Nicholson novels which were ok, but this one wasn't worth the time I spent reading it.

Have you read his Bleeding London? I've been meaning to read that forever (and moved it like 4 times). I think I'll finally get to it this spring.

I'm also taking a bit of break from the serious stuff and am reading Lauren Beukes' Zoo City, which is sort of a future fantasy novel where people who commit terrible crimes are paired up with animal familiars -- and are then ostracized. It is notable mostly for being set in Hillbrow, South Africa. The set-up is hard to swallow, but it moves along quickly.

[paul secor]

Geoff Nicholson: The City Under the Skin

I've read a couple of other Nicholson novels which were ok, but this one wasn't worth the time I spent reading it.

Have you read his Bleeding London? I've been meaning to read that forever (and moved it like 4 times). I think I'll finally get to it this spring.

I'm also taking a bit of break from the serious stuff and am reading Lauren Beukes' Zoo City, which is sort of a future fantasy novel where people who commit terrible crimes are paired up with animal familiars -- and are then ostracized. It is notable mostly for being set in Hillbrow, South Africa. The set-up is hard to swallow, but it moves along quickly.

Looking at a list of his novels, it appears that the only one I've read is A Knot Garden. I enjoyed that one much more than The City Under the Skin. The City Under the Skin has a cartoon-like quality to it which doesn't appeal to me.

[erwbol]

[paul secor]

P.G. Wodehouse: Right Ho, Jeeves

[jlhoots]

Timothy Hallinan: For The Dead

[xybert]

Stephen King - Wizard And Glass (The Dark Tower Vol. 4)

Pure unadulterated easy to read holiday comfort food/nostalgia/escapism and i'm thoroughly enjoying it. Reading these during summer holidays takes me back to reading them during summer holidays as a kid (the first three books, anyway, but still the same universe). The sun blazing outside really adds to the atmosphere. As an added bonus the paper they used in this edition smells like old comic books, so i'm periodically sniffing and tripping out on that too.

[Simon8]

[Jazzmoose]

Aw, come on; you can't post that and not comment!

[erwbol]

Aw, come on; you can't post that and not comment!

I had just come back from the bookstore!

I used to read William Gibson and other US science fiction authors in high school. The last Gibson I read was Virtual Light in 1995. I only started reading science fiction again in 2010 when I discovered Iain M. Bank's Culture novels through io9.com. My first Banks was Surface Detail.

Last year I reread Neuromancer. It was still very good and a much easier read now that my English has vastly improved.

[ejp626]

I'm reading a pairing of philosophical pieces: Tolstoy's A Confession where he discusses being a miserable free-thinker/atheist and he is gradually coming back to religion (sort of like C.S. Lewis's The Case for Christianity or Mere Christianity or even more so Surprised by Joy -- blah and one more strike against Tolstoy) and James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, which goes into predestination and features a character who sees the folly of his ways (in believing in predestination). In its purest form, predestination is a pretty awful philosophy as it seems to remove any meaning from the concept of Free Will. Both are a bit of a slog, but they are both relatively short.

Then I turn to Soviet-era literature, starting with Krzhizhanovsky's Autobiography of a Corpse (another book I would know nothing about if it were not for NYRB). Then Platonov's Happy Moscow.

Hard to believe I am looking forward to Soviet realist literature as a balm for reading Tolstoy.

Zoo City was ok, but as I said, getting past the set-up required a bit too much "faith" on my part. Not surprisingly, it has been optioned as a movie.

Edited December 31, 2014 by ejp626

[sidewinder]

This one has been entertaining. 'Only in Toronto..'

[Leeway]

A WORD CHILD - Iris Murdoch -1975

Finishing the year like I've started the last couple of years, with an Iris Murdoch novel, in this case, A Word Child. Started this book once or twice before, but never gained traction, but this time I got pulled in. It's the first-person narrative of Hilary Burde, from the wrong side of the tracks, who rises to linguist at an Oxford college, only for it to go smash, literally. Hilary has been having an affair with Anne, the pregnant wife of Gunnar, an Oxford colleague and friend. Burde kills Anne in a car accident--or was it? This is one of the great novels of sin, repentance, reconciliation, and the need to go on. Philosophically and spiritually, this might be one of Murdoch's deepest novels. I think she is at the height of her powers here. Surprisingly, there is a streak of roguish and mordant humor in the novel, courtesy of the wolfish narrator. Reminds me of her The Black Prince, but more affecting.

[Jazzmoose]

My first Banks was Surface Detail.

I'm in 'catch up' mode myself, and haven't read Banks yet. Would you recommend Surface Detail as a starting point? I was going to go with Consider Phlebas, but I haven't a clue.

[erwbol]

Surface Detail is not considered a good starting point by most. Usually one of the first three novels is recommended for people new to the Culture. I disagree.

With the first three (Consider Phlebas, Player of Games, and Use of Weapons) his mature prose style was not yet formed. Neither had the Culture been completely sketched out. That only happened with the fourth novel, Excession, the greatest of them all. Consider Phlebas is overrated in my opinion and not told from a Culture perspective. Player of Games begins to sketch out the human and drone (only a relatively modest degree smarter than humans) side of the Culture. Use of Weapons is more a (human) psychological novel with an unusual structure. Both POG and UOW focus on the Culture's Contact arm intervening in foreign civilizations for the greater good.

Later novels feature the ship and orbital Minds (incredibly advanced and godlike AIs) as major characters with psychological depth. Minds are what make the Culture tick. Excession is the Mind novel and therefore you'd benefit from some prior introduction to the Culture beyond what a web article (see below) could provide you.

Good first Culture novels are Player of Games (keeping in mind it is an early work), Look to Windward, and, after an introduction provided by some web articles, also Surface Detail.

The Hydrogen Sonata is his sublime last Culture novel published shortly before Banks discovered he had only months to live. Ironically it deals with death and immortality.

Ignore Inversions and Matter for the time being.

In 1994 Banks wrote an essay called A Few Notes On the Culture which was posted on a newsgroup by Ken MacLeod.

An io9 introduction to the Culture can be found here.

Edited December 31, 2014 by erwbol

[Brad]

The Burning of the World: A Memoir of 1914 by Bela Zombory-Moldovan. ...

This is another great book from New York Review of Books Classics. They have an incredible catalogue.

I know. I am halfway through their edition of Platonov's Soul. I even have a short post (http://erics-hangout.blogspot.ca/2014/08/publishers-of-note.html) going into some of the books that I find particularly worthy.

I just visited your blog. An impressive list. I joined their book club and received as one of the bonus books My Face for the World to See. A very impressive book by Alfred Hayes, with an economic style of writing. The prose is taut and he explores some ideas that ring true for many of us.

I became initially interested in reading NYRB Classics by reading Zweig's Beware of Pity, his only full length novel. That was soon followed by his Chess Story, Post Office Girl and Confusion, all highly recommended.I like Zweig as well, though I have mostly read his short stories. It's definitely worth checking out Pushkin Press. I am toying with the idea of getting their Collected Stories of Zweig, though there would be a lot of duplication. Also, as nice/impressive as this is, I would never read it on the train! http://pushkinpress.com/book/the-collected-stories-of-stefan-zweig/

Speaking of subscriptions, I am definitely looking into Melville House's subscription to their Art of the Novella series, though in my case I'd have to opt for the ebook version: http://www.mhpbooks.com/merchandise/novellas/

For me, it looks like April - July 2015 would be perfect.I never realized this but it looks like Pushkin is putting out Zweig's works in hardcover and paperback while NYRB is doing the paperback. I assume Pushkin has European rights and NYRB US rights.

I've just started to read his memoirs, The World of Yesterday.

Edited January 1, 2015 by Brad

[Jazzmoose]

Surface Detail is not considered a good starting point by most. Usually one of the first three novels is recommended for people new to the Culture. I disagree.

With the first three (Consider Phlebas, Player of Games, and Use of Weapons) his mature prose style was not yet formed. Neither had the Culture been completely sketched out. That only happened with the fourth novel, Excession, the greatest of them all. Consider Phlebas is overrated in my opinion and not told from a Culture perspective. Player of Games begins to sketch out the human and drone (only a relatively modest degree smarter than humans) side of the Culture. Use of Weapons is more a (human) psychological novel with an unusual structure. Both POG and UOW focus on the Culture's Contact arm intervening in foreign civilizations for the greater good.

Later novels feature the ship and orbital Minds (incredibly advanced and godlike AIs) as major characters with psychological depth. Minds are what make the Culture tick. Excession is the Mind novel and therefore you'd benefit from some prior introduction to the Culture beyond what a web article (see below) could provide you.

Good first Culture novels are Player of Games (keeping in mind it is an early work), Look to Windward, and, after an introduction provided by some web articles, also Surface Detail.

The Hydrogen Sonata is his sublime last Culture novel published shortly before Banks discovered he had only months to live. Ironically it deals with death and immortality.

Ignore Inversions and Matter for the time being.

In 1994 Banks wrote an essay called A Few Notes On the Culture which was posted on a newsgroup by Ken MacLeod.

An io9 introduction to the Culture can be found here.

Many thanks!

[Leeway]

Following my NYE Big Book Resolution, I've started reading Clarissa. Of course, even a 100 pages completed is a mere drop in the bucket; one feels overwhelmed by the page count. I also discovered that holding an oversized, 1600 page volume presents certain unanticipated physical problems; it's heavy and hard to hold. It seems to be holding me, not the other way around. Notwithstanding, I'm launched; we'll see how far we get.

Following up on Bill F's Penelope Fitzgerald/Hermione Lee posts, here's a nice review by the Washington Post's Michael Dirda. My only quibble is his forward-comparison of Marilynne Robinson to Fitzgerald; it just struck me as odd and inapposite. The Hermione Lee bio looks quite interesting.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/michael-dirda-reviews-penelope-fitzgerald-a-life-by-hermione-lee/2014/12/31/3e9bd460-8d1e-11e4-a085-34e9b9f09a58_story.html

[paul secor]

Following my NYE Big Book Resolution, I've started reading Clarissa. Of course, even a 100 pages completed is a mere drop in the bucket; one feels overwhelmed by the page count. I also discovered that holding an oversized, 1600 page volume presents certain unanticipated physical problems; it's heavy and hard to hold. It seems to be holding me, not the other way around. Notwithstanding, I'm launched; we'll see how far we get.

Following up on Bill F's Penelope Fitzgerald/Hermione Lee posts, here's a nice review by the Washington Post's Michael Dirda. My only quibble is his forward-comparison of Marilynne Robinson to Fitzgerald; it just struck me as odd and inapposite. The Hermione Lee bio looks quite interesting.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/michael-dirda-reviews-penelope-fitzgerald-a-life-by-hermione-lee/2014/12/31/3e9bd460-8d1e-11e4-a085-34e9b9f09a58_story.html

I've always enjoyed Dirda's reviews. I don't pick up on everything - he's much more widely and deeply read than I - but he has an enthusiasm that I appreciate.

[BillF]

Following my NYE Big Book Resolution, I've started reading Clarissa. Of course, even a 100 pages completed is a mere drop in the bucket; one feels overwhelmed by the page count. I also discovered that holding an oversized, 1600 page volume presents certain unanticipated physical problems; it's heavy and hard to hold. It seems to be holding me, not the other way around. Notwithstanding, I'm launched; we'll see how far we get.

Following up on Bill F's Penelope Fitzgerald/Hermione Lee posts, here's a nice review by the Washington Post's Michael Dirda. My only quibble is his forward-comparison of Marilynne Robinson to Fitzgerald; it just struck me as odd and inapposite. The Hermione Lee bio looks quite interesting.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/michael-dirda-reviews-penelope-fitzgerald-a-life-by-hermione-lee/2014/12/31/3e9bd460-8d1e-11e4-a085-34e9b9f09a58_story.html

Yes, the Fitzgerald biography, received as a Christmas present, is here and waiting. I thought I would finish her novels first, though the later ones are proving less to my taste. Eventually the penny dropped on why they're so different. Now into the late 80s/early 90s, postmodernisn raises its ugly head so I shouldn't be surprised by novels set in obscure historical periods with real life characters and references to such things as Italian cinema, Russian literature and book production.

[ejp626]

I've generally had trouble getting through Penelope Fitzgerald's books, even though many of them are on the short side. I may try again some day. I was going to say the only one I really liked was City of the Mind, but that's Penelope Lively (oops). I think she is a bit more to my taste, though I don't know if she goes into postmodernism or not .

I'm planning on reading more by Elizabeth Bowen and Elizabeth Tayor and rereading Pym in the next couple of years. I'm actually just starting Bowen's To the North today.

One interesting novella by Tess Slesinger ("The Answer on the Magnolia Tree") is collected in On Being Told That Her Second Husband Has Taken His First Lover and Other Stories. "Magnolia Tree" can be read as a bit of a bookend to Spark's Miss Jean Brodie, though you end up in the heads of more characters -- teachers and students. I guess I'd describe it as High Modernism lite -- a bit easier to follow than Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, for instance. Worth reading once for sure.

Inspired by Leeway, I just picked up a copy of Murdoch's A Word Child, but it will be quite a while before I get around to reading it...

Edited January 2, 2015 by ejp626

[BillF]

Still with Fitzgerald, this one set in pre-revolutionary Russia.

[Leeway]

More on Fitzgerald, from a blog I happen to read occasionally. Meanwhile, I am firmly locked in Clarissa's embrace!

"The problem that I’m having with Penelope Fitzgerald’s late novels is that their excellence, their extraordinary agility, is almost ephemeral, because the books are so short. It took no time at all to read The Gate of Angels, which I loved while I was reading it but now have trouble remembering, only a few hours later. I have trouble remembering why I liked it. I still remember why I liked — loved — Innocence: I was captured by its insouciant but quite genuine Italian quality; the novel deserves an entry in that catalogue, Sprezzatura. The Beginning of Spring did not appeal to anything like the same extent. I felt, not without chuckling amusement, as though Ivy Compton-Burnett were taking over the translation of a Russian classic from Constance Garnett. If Innocence struck me as echt, The Beginning of Spring felt pastiche. This distinction is simply a reflection of my very different regard for things Italian and Russian. To me, Russia is a version of the Wild-West United States that hasn’t got the sense to use the Latin alphabet. My dislike of the prelates of Orthodoxy is unsurpassed, at least by other dislikes.

What did interest me about The Beginning of Spring was its strange echo of imperialism. The hero, Frank Reid, is British by background but Russian by birth. Frank was educated in Russia and speaks perfect Russian. Had the setting been India, this fluency would have been unlikely, as would have been the local education. The management of a printing works is an almost stereotypically imperial sort of business, but whatever its commercial activities might have been, Britain never subjected Russia to its yoke; on the contrary, Russia ran its own empire, and vied with Britain for mastery in Central Asia. All the clichés of empire — the alluring, the dangerous, the unintelligible, the backward — are present in The Beginning of Spring, but they are set in what in music would be called a remote key.

With its English setting — London and Cambridge, also in 1912 — The Gate of Angelsis extremely familiar, more familiar than it might be if I hadn’t read all the mystery novels of Charles Todd last year. The fictional enterprise of creating a fictional Oxbridge college for the purposes of satire is as comfortable as my favorite napping blanket — and that’s a problem. This is where I think the novel undercuts itself: there is no need in this love story for the extremity of St Angelicus College, and the gratuitousness of the creation is highlighted at the finale, when Daisy Saunders, ever the capable conscientious nurse, violates the college’s male-only hygeine, explicitly likened to that of Mount Athos, in order to relieve the “syncope” of the blind master, whom she finds prostrate at the foot of the tiny quad’s solitary tree. The dons who cluck at her presence are ineffectual hens, and it turns out that Fred Fairly, the junior fellow whose passionate devotion to Daisy powers the plot, is not even on the premises. St Angelicus gives Fitzgerald the pretext for a delightful retelling of the synopsis of La Favorita, the opera about antipope Benedict XIII, only (tellingly) without the Favorite. But that’s about all it’s good for. The solidly stimulating writing about the (quite real) Cavendish Laboratory makes the imaginary college even flufflier.

Now that I’ve dissed The Gate of Angels, I remember, and like, it better."

[BillF]

Thanks for that, Leeway. I shall be adding "echt" to What Word Did You Learn Today?

[uli]

I am periodically re-reading the Glauser novels on the German Gutenberg site but like the English cover and plan to read one of the translated novels just out of curiosity.

I am also reading

interesting for me not knowing much detail of the period of american history but got a bit stuck.

when I did not know what to read I picked this from our bookshelf I am reading that too

I am not big on reading poetry or plays and did not know anything by or of Lorca other than he was proably killed by Franco's thugs. I like a good biography and this is right on track. so far.I mean he hang out in college with Dali and Bunuel

Edited January 6, 2015 by uli