books, books, books

[Otis Westinghouse]

So do you have a 2.5 hour commute too?

Mood: next up, Moby Dick or Ulysses for your lad.

[mood swung]

Now Otis, I've read BOTH of those and I've got the doorstops to prove it!

The main thing that has stayed with me lo these 20 years since I first read MD is the scene where all the sailors are swimming around in the sperm whale's...uh, um, sperm...I remember thinking 'good lord, how did this get published back in the day?!'

[so lacklustre]

I don't know, I guess I just like more sex and foul language in my reading. 'Cause I'm such a high-class broad.

Have you tried Irvine Welsh?

[Goody2Shoes]

No, I haven't read Irvine Welsh. He wrote Trainspotting, though, is that right? Yes, I guess that would meet the 'foul language' requirement!

[Goody2Shoes]

So do you have a 2.5 hour commute too?

Who, me? Nope, nothing like 2.5 hours. I read all those over a month, maybe more, and they are, with the exception of parts of the David Foster Wallace book, very quick reading. I'm not too bright, see, don't like to tax my brain too much.

[johnfoyle]

Orhan Pamuk's winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature has drawn a mixed response.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articl ... 49,00.html

I've read Snow , finding it a demanding read that made it's point early on and became a bit repetative. It's use of various literary devices ( time shifts etc.) is interesting . Maybe the translation didn't do it justice.

Mr Pamuk deserves the award alone, I suppose, for having survived a brief encounter with me -



I'd gone along to a reading by Marie Darrieussecq and he was part of the same session in a writers festival. The section he read from My Name Is Read was fabulous stuff but , I'm ashamed to say, I still haven't read the book in full.

[miss buenos aires]

I found Snow a bit... I don't know what I found it a bit, but I didn't love it. A bit boring, I guess.

[ReadyToHearTheWorst]

On a beach in Majorca:

Simon Sharma - Rough Crossings
Starts with a fascinating account of the War of Independance, from the slave perspective. Then details the resettlement of the black Loyalists, first in Nova Scotia then Siera Leone. Turned many of my preconceptions of the WoI upside down. For example, it seems that the South only joined the rebellion because the British had threatened to raise a Slave army. Even GW himself lost slaves to the British lines.

Malcolm Pryce - Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth
Something is rotten on the west coast of the principality. Myfanwy's been kidnapped (was the ice cream drugged?), the organ grinder wants a 150 yr old crime solved (by next Thursday), and his monkey is missing her son (have you seen Mr Bojangles?). Louis Knight, gumshoe, must find the answers - not just because he loves Myfanwy, but because he bought the ice cream.

Welsh noir, isn't it!

Terry Pratchett - Equal Rites
Usual DiscWorld goings on. After 7 puns and 19 humorous asides we have a conflagration, a resolution, and all ends well.

[pophead2k]

July, July by Tim O'Brien. A story about a group of friends that takes place at their 30th college graduation reunion. Someone here, I can't remember who, recommended this a while ago. Breathtaking. Stories like these I think have a tendency to be rather maudlin, and have too much of a "opportunities missed" theme, and while that is certainly present here, O'Brien manages to tell it without getting soppy and sentimental. It's not "The Big Chill". The last 3 pages are especially riveting, serious goose-bump material. I read them about a dozen times, had the same reaction each time through.

It may have been me who recommended it, but if I didn't, I should have. I really loved that book. For another amazing book by O'Brien check out In the Lake of the Woods. Amazing.

Right now I'm reading and enjoying The Great Stink by a Clare Clark. Only just getting into it, but it is set in mid 19th century London and revolves around the upgrading of the sewer system (hence the title). To say that her descriptive powers regarding the olfactory functions are incredible would be an understatement. Throw in a mystery, Crimean War post-traumatic stress, and a motley assortment of lowlifes, civil engineers, and urchins, and you have the making of a cracking good yarn.

[Otis Westinghouse]

Finished Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, a month after I intended to. I like him generally, and this impressed me. Some I know hated it and didn't even finish it (always ill-advised, especially with him), some were indifferent, some loved it. It takes the issue of cloning and insstead of dealing with it in a scientific/sci-fi way, comes at it from the human angle, and is often very poignant along the way. It's also a boarding school (with a difference) novel. Some aspects of its basic premise are weirdly illogical and unbelievable, but I guess he can be forgiven that in pursuit of a powerful story.

Now for Roth's American Pastoral.

[miss buenos aires]

Finished Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, a month after I intended to. I like him generally, and this impressed me. Some I know hated it and didn't even finish it (always ill-advised, especially with him), some were indifferent, some loved it. It takes the issue of cloning and insstead of dealing with it in a scientific/sci-fi way, comes at it from the human angle, and is often very poignant along the way. It's also a boarding school (with a difference) novel. Some aspects of its basic premise are weirdly illogical and unbelievable, but I guess he can be forgiven that in pursuit of a powerful story.

Now for Roth's American Pastoral.

I liked Never Let Me Go, but I found the narrator a little...lacking in affect. I know that is an Ishiguro thing, but I wanted her to react to things (like the numerous betrayals of her best friend) more than she did.

[Otis Westinghouse]

It's both a stylistic limitation and a strength of the book, no? for the book to work, it needs the innocent, somewhat guileless voicce of Kathy to carry it off. This is how it seemed to me. It's impact was not going to be through brilliance of expression, more the wretched and touching detail. Have you tried The Unconsoled? Some love, some hate. My terribly well-read would be novelist chum put it down in disgusst.

[miss buenos aires]

I loved it the first time I read it, and then I tried to reread it a year or two ago and got bogged down in it fairly quickly. I was in no way disgusted by it, though.

[alexv]

Otis, you asked about The Unconsoled.

I must confess that I did not like that book very much. I got through it, solely out of respect for Ishiguro's prior work back in 97 (when I went back to the book a couple of days ago, I found a 97 commuting ticket I had been using as bookmark). I reread it, in order to answer your question. It was a tedious task.

My theory is that Ishiguro, fresh from the incredible sucess of Remains of the Day was going through a tortured period (too famous too soon with pressure to come up with the next big thing), and the book is a reflection of his screwed up state of mind. "Oh, the pressures of fame!! You want product, I'll give you product. Here's my Finnegans Wake. Now make sense of it".

Ryder, it seems to me, is Ishiguro, a renowned artist faced with mounting public pressure to perform miracles, and with a private responsibilities (towards parents, wife, children, friends) that he can't quite handle at the same time. The book is this surreal, paranoid narrative that, in my reading of it, is meant to evoke the protagonist/author's frenzied state of mind and life. Which is a promising idea. But in execution, the book is all disjointed narrative, stilted writing (the formality of Ishiguro's writing drives me nuts), and characters that are not fleshed out enough for me to care. Sophia, boris, Brodsky and Stephan are key characters that I just end up not knowing enough about.

The book also addresses the issue of the proper role of art in a community (another meaty idea), but again I find the whole execution to be pedestrian. Brodsky as tortured artist; Ryder as artistic savior; the town-folk as meek and yet demanding consumers (in the worst possible sense of that word) of art and artist. It all seems too obvious somehow, with no nuance.

I did like a couple of things: remember Brodsky's recollection of his sexual "adventures" with Miss Collins? I almost fell off my chair, reading such "trash" in an Ishiguro novel. It was my first contented smile in the whole book. The other was the whole 2001 Space Odyssey riff. Did you catch how, in Ryder's telling of it, the movie has Clint Eastwood and Yul Brynner in it? Now, I ain't no Bobster/Vez movie freak but those guys were not in the movie. What was that about? Surely a hint that the novel's events (the back and forth in time and location; the dream-like sequences) should not be judged by our reality (the one where Keir Dullea and that other guy are in the movie).

Obviously, the book made an impression, and in that sense it's almost as if Ishiguro is playing this perverse joke on me by torturing me while I'm reading the damn thing, and then leaving me with these enduring impressions. But oh, the torture of actually reading this stuff!!

[Goody2Shoes]

It may have been me who recommended it, but if I didn't, I should have. I really loved that book. For another amazing book by O'Brien check out In the Lake of the Woods. Amazing.

If it was you that recommended July, July, I thank you ! I loved it. Yes, In the Lake of the Woods is on my (very long) list of gonna-reads. I've also read his The Things They Carried and Going After Cacciato, and found both of them wonderful, as well.

[Otis Westinghouse]

Obviously, the book made an impression, and in that sense it's almost as if Ishiguro is playing this perverse joke on me by torturing me while I'm reading the damn thing, and then leaving me with these enduring impressions. But oh, the torture of actually reading this stuff!!

Thanks for notes. I suspect this will stay in the unread list. Right now I'm thrilled by American Pastoral. Roth distils so much thought and experience into every paragraph that I feel like every page is an advancement in the collective consciousness of humanity. I'm reading it very slowly, letting it all sink in, going back to revisit details pages before, etc. It makes me very keen to read as much of his stuff as I can, especially, right now, all the 'Zuckerman novels'. The New Jersey details are fascinating to me. Literature at its best, I would say.

[johnfoyle]

The feature tells of the piles of dross that clutter up bookshops ; how many authors can you attach to each category?


http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/book ... 930751.ece


Boyd Tonkin: A Week in Books
Published: 27 October 2006


Gerry Johnson, the new MD of Waterstone's, has sensibly pointed out that classifications still used in bookshops no longer match the titles on the shelves. So far he has suggested a few fresh categories - such as "globalisation" - rather than the brutally honest rethink buyers might prefer. The Christmas frenzy creates opportunities for fearlessly frank, WYSIWYG labelling in stores. So why don't retailers kick off the festive season with candid descriptions of the sub-genres now favoured in the trade, along with a hype-free sketch of typical authors? One can but dream...


Mid-Life Motormouths: He's plump, he's smug, he's bigoted, and he can knock off 300 pages of "politically incorrect" twaddle as fast as you can say "back-tax bill". A perfect gift for every dyspeptic has-been in 40-inch waistband jeans who confuses Rod Liddle with Evelyn Waugh.

Postgraduate Tarts: Her agent swears that "Poule de Luxe" really did get a First in Greats from Balliol before turning tricks with minor soap stars to fund her Harvard MBA - and, no, she's definitely not a middle-aged editor from East Sheen cackling into her Chablis as she takes in the eye-popping size of that cheque.

Counterfeit Chaps: He lives in Tooting and writes captions for a lads' mag. But under a hyphenated nom de plume this retro gent will lay down the law on how to wear a tux, mix a drink, tie a fly, button a fly and sweet-talk the fillies. He'd like to act the David Niven rather than the David Essex that he (and his reader) really is.

Neo-Victorian Oddballs: This rum cove in tweeds spent 20 years nosing around fake-Gothic churches; now he comes along with a 1,000-page pastiche chiller full of fogs and flagellations. A dead cert for book groups, said the agent; alas, they're chortling over Rupert Everett instead.

Ivy League Divas: No, we didn't understand her metaphysical road novel about Schopenhauer and surfing either. But she sports Marc Jacobs, hangs out in arty Brooklyn bars and is buddies with David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Safran Foer and other cult types with even longer names.

Clapped-out Comedians: From the Royal Variety Performance to daytime name-that-fruit quiz shows in 10 uneasy steps, via drink, divorce and red-top-friendly "moments of madness". No one gives a monkey's any more, but publishers are praying that someone will imagine that their nostalgic auntie might, after a snowball or three.

Teenage Vixen Superstars: The lips of Lana Turner, the dress sense of Lily Savage, the soul of Emperor Tiberius. This reality-show dominatrix has packed more into her 18 years than her agent has into 80, and has the boudoir diaries to prove it. Be very nice to her now, book people, so you you don't end up scrubbing her marble floors with a toothbrush 10 years down the line.

Borderline-Psychotic Chefs: In any other line of work we'd be talking Asbos and ABH, if not a 28-day Section. But this kitchen devil has a two-star gaff and snorting buddies who run indie TV firms. So the glossy tie-in tome prints his angelic primary-school pics and scrumptious recipes for plum duff, ginger beer and cheese on toast.

Control-Freak Pedants: After 20 years fuming quietly on the subs desk, she struck gold with a stocking-filler hit. Now it's our turn to suffer: we will buy and obey her rulebook on god-daughters' thank-you letters, silver service, overnight stays by long-standing gay couples, and the diplomatic history of the Schleswig-Holstein question.

World Cup Walkovers: This burnt-out soccer wunderkind bombed in Germany, hasn't scored in months and leaves his sports-hack ghostwriter whimpering in despair. But another couple of volumes into his megabucks, multi-memoir deal and he'll come good with the old "I-went-to- 'substance'-hell-and-back" routine. Honest...

[alexv]

Newly read and recommended:

"A World Full of Gods" by Keith Hopkins (now deceased)--Believe it or not, readable and interesting account of the rise of Christianity in the pre-Constantine period. Great stuff on the various versions of what we now know as Christianity that were floating around then. Also great stuff on the sex-mad (bless them) Pompeians.

"Keepers of the Flame" by Ian Hamilton-- Interesting book about the rise of biography as an art form, mainly literary biographies. Spans the time from Donne to Larkin (but the book was published before the publication of Larkin's letters and bio, and the ensuing furor).

"Young Shakespeare" by Russell Fraser-- Not as crazy about his style. I find his writing annoying with all his asides, but it attacks the Bard's life (whatever there is of it) by emphasizing the times in which he lived, and the Elizabethan period stuff is fun.

"The Roman Way" by Edith Hamilton-- A little formal (written some time ago by a now deceased waspy proffesor), but with good stuff on Catullus and the gang. I love the Romans.

[Otis Westinghouse]

You and your commute! Great list. Jealous!

[alexv]

These days, Otis, I get even more time to read due to the following: here in the Northeast, at this time of the year, leaves are coming down in droves. You would think that this simple fact would not have an impact on railway journeys. But it does!! The leaves find their way on to the train tracks of The Metropolitan Transportation Authority and that great and powerful entity can't seem to find a way (despite getting more than $300 a month from suckers like me) to prevent the leaves from damaging its cars, and, in wet weather, preventing the cars from braking. As a result, my now legendary 1.5 hour commute each way has become during the last 10 days or so a 2 hour each way commute. By the time I leave the train, my eyes are so tired from reading I can barely find my car. My week-ends, by the way, are spent blowing the dammned leaves from my yard into the woods (only to see the wind blow them back by the following week-end). I hate fall.

[Otis Westinghouse]

I love it! The colour of the leaves has been fabulous. And the smells! In England we joke about 'the wrong sort of leaves' being blamed by the rail network for train delays, same as with wrong sort of snow. The idea is that we can only handle the middle path here, extremes completely confound us, and yet look at Scandinavia, etc. So I thought you'd only have the right sort of leaves or no leaves at all there. It's a good way to wreck your eyes.

[alexv]

"Van Morrison: No Surrender" by Johnny Rogan--

I know this is supposed to be a serious biography of the great man, but I only enjoyed the trashy bits,of which there are many, since the writer clearly loathes Van. I did not know that balding, middle-aged, paunchy wee Ivan, allegedly despondent over the Rocca tapes (he allegedly paid huge sums of money to have his swanky girl friend spied upon and got some nasty goods on her), allegedly sought comfort in a cheap hotel room threesome with two allegedly middle-aged divorcees, who admitted to the tryst, claiming that "there was no kinky sex". I'm using the word "allegedly" a lot here because, as I've learned from the book, Van sues a lot of people, and these are all "allegations".

And even better, I did not know that balding, middle-aged, paunchy wee Ivan allegedly had affairs (while still tied to crazy Rocca) with Jerry Lee's middle aged married (for the 9th time) sister, and with drinking buddy Shane McGowan's girlfriend Victoria Clarke (Shane: "So now it's Van the "other" man) giving rise to the McGowan ditty "Victoria" with the now legendary lines: "Victoria, Victoria, you left me in opium euphoria and went off with a fat monk saying a Gloria".

The strangest thing about the book is that the author tries to link Van's life to political events in Ireland, particularly trying to associate Van with the Protestant side of things. As a result, a good chunk of the book is made up of summaries of political events which then he tries, awkwardly, to link to Van's life at those times. I skipped all this stuff.

I did like the last chapter where he goes into an interesting explanation for why he thinks that Van is basically a "rock" singer, and not, as Van claims, a rhythm and blues or straight blues singer. In short: not an r&b singer because he doesn't have the chops; not a blues singer because not black and doesn't have the chops; not a jazz singer for the same lack of chops reason. Where does that leave you? Rock, apparently, the label for those with high aspirations and limited skills. Interesting thought.

[Otis Westinghouse]

Sounds like utter bollocks from start to finish! Always wanted to read his 'Morrissey and Marr: the Severed Alliance', which is allegedly a good read. Good enough to make Moz prounce a wish for JR's death in a motorway pile-up.

[verbal gymnastics]

Bob Dylan - Chronicles
Brian Hinton - Let Them All Talk
Bella Pollard - Midnight Cactus (chick book that I read on holiday because I'd read the other two).

[ice nine]

Just finished Music Lust: Recommended Listening for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason by Nic Harcourt. Nic isn't foremost a writer of books and this is evident. The essays read like they have been written for a high school paper. (Sorry Nic. He has probably been lurking on the board) But Nic knows much about music. The book is a 'Who's Who' of music.

Nic is the music director of KCRW and the host of Morning Becomes Electic.