what are you reading now?

OK, I've not read any Borges but I thought he was regarded as one of the granddaddies of magic realism along with Marquez. I've probably been using the term loosely though.

I like Burroughs too but I prefer his more structured stuff - I started reading The Soft Machine last year and got really bogged down, I found it just made so little sense as to be too frustrating to read enjoyably. Maybe I should give it another go.

borges was more a literary escher (illusions, labyrinths, reviews of non-existent books, that sort of thing) than a surrealist, but i'm sure he was an influence on the magical realists.

i read the soft machine at seventeen or eighteen and vaguely remember lots of depravity with giant millipedes and that sort of thing, which is why i don't think i'll return to it soon, but i do remember it being very good, if a little fucked up.

the electronic revolution is the colder, burroughs writing machines burroughs rather than the drug and sex burroughs, this facet seems more relevant to me in that one sees echoes of the book in all manner of defence and security-related things, it's very prescient. i suspect you'd like it.

Cool, I hadn't heard of that one, I'll check it out. Apart from Naked Lunch (obvs) the only full-length book of his I've read all of is Cities of the Red Night, which I thought was fucking amazing. I like various of his shorter pieces and spoken-word things too.

the only other one i've read is naked lunch, so clearly i have to read cities of the red night to balance things out! the one i mentioned incidentally is a collection of essays, not a novel.

Everyone who thinks magical realism is un-political should read Garcia Marquez' Autumn of the Patriarch, by far his best book. In that one, the fantastical elements are used to show how the lies and propaganda from the regime blurs the line between real and invention, and to show just how unreal the atrocities comitted are. It's bleak and devastating.

If used well, the magic elements can really skewer stuff like ideology and repressive regimes. It's a bit like in Beloved, or even Master and Margarita. Flann O'Briens An Beal Bocht has a bit of the same, with it's weird tales, clearly based on nationalistic inventions.

Mr. Tea said:

Cool, I hadn't heard of that one, I'll check it out. Apart from Naked Lunch (obvs) the only full-length book of his I've read all of is Cities of the Red Night, which I thought was fucking amazing. I like various of his shorter pieces and spoken-word things too.

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I read Junk/y last year and thought it was amazing, started reading his books in chronological order. You should definitely check out Junk and Queer - first two books which are highly autobiographical and not written weirdly. The Yage Letters fits in after Junk but is a bit of a footnote rather than a full book and I wouldn't necessarily bother with.

He then moved onto Naked Lunch and the more weird stuff, which is where I'm up to in my attempts...will return.

Another good pre-weird Burroughs book is 'And the hippos were boiled in their tanks' which he co-wrote with Kerouac (they wrote alternating chapters each i think), based on a true story about a friend of theirs who committed a murder. Its the most straight forward thing I've read of his. Also the collected letters are worth reading too.

Still haven't read Queer or COTRN but I really really want to.

RE: Beloved. I studied this at university but don't remember much about it apart from it was incredibly depressing. Also read Jazz by Toni Morrison which was very good but also incredibly confusing narrative-wise. If we hadn't been studying it and breaking it down in tutorials I'm not sure I would have been able to follow it but I'd recommend it to anyone up for a challenge.

Yeah Beloved is incredibly depressing. I don't know if that's a reason not to read a book... maybe sometimes it is.
Just picked-up a book of short stories by Gore Vidal called A Thirsty Evil. Very short - you can read the whole thing in a couple of hours - but something very clever about it. Nasty, precise little stories that don't necessarily go anywhere but which leave an impression on you. A couple of stories about pretty boys hustling older men in beach-side resorts remind me somehow of Tender is the Night which I read recently. Maybe Somerset Maugham as well I guess. Recommended anyway.

Mr. Tea said:

I like Burroughs too but I prefer his more structured stuff -

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Lightweight....

slim jenkins said:

Lightweight....

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I think my verdict at the time was "page after page of drug nonsense and random buggery". I mean, not that there's anything wrong with that per se, but you know...

bandshell said:

you sure you weren't reading the daily mail?

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Haha, I would love to read a Daily Mail review of some WSB...

Just before I start on my fifth book of his. Can anyone tell me exactly what the point of Roberto Bolano is?

i think the point is that he's the more current and universal of the recent spanish-language writers, taking the latin american angle and mixing it up with american / european themes and so on; he was translated fairly late in his career, when he had honed his craft; and he died young, giving the publishing industry a boost in the form of a good recent book (savage detectives), a posthumous superbook (2666) and a back-catalogue of older books. he also has this outsider/bad-boy aura about him which adds to the mystique. as to whether you should like him or not, that is subjective i guess (i liked the above books, but wouldn't consider him in my list of favourite reads/writers).

ok, not properly reading (as in, not holding a physical book) but i'm enjoying hilaire belloc very much. very silly, amusing stuff available here:

http://archive.org/details/badchildsbookofb00belluoft

with illustrations!

cut up trilogy is burroughs best but i like things like the do easy essay too.

Belloc rules. I started Gormenghast over the weekend: totally new for me and I barely know what it will be about.

Picked up a book my flatmate had left in the toilet called Wolverine Creates The World: Labrador Indian Tales. It's a lot of fun - at the start it's at pains to stress how fucking difficult life is in the extreme north, how the Innu never called the earth mother or even liked it much cos it didn't provide, or not much anyway. The tales are obsessed with food and cannibalism and animals and hunting and sex... and shit. At the start it warns how scatalogical the stories are, my favourite so far is called Why Certain Creatures Live in Rotten Tree Stumps. The gist of the story is as follows:

Wolverine is looking for a man to go hunting with him, he finds a tent but there are only two women there, a mother and her daughter. The daughter claims to be a man in disguise so he asks to watch her piss. She squats revealing that she is a woman. Seeing that he is not fooled she grabs his penis and sticks it between her legs but the mother says she should go first and grabs it and puts it between her legs instead. Wolverine fucks them both and then goes hunting but falls asleep because he is tired. Spider, Caterpillar and Ant see Wolverine asleep and, smelling his penis, realise that there must be a woman nearby so they head off in search of her. Wolverine wakes up and still has an erection so decides to head back for more action only to discover the three creepy-crawlies crawling in and out of the women's vaginas saying "What a sweet taste, how lovely" so Wolverine grabs them and throws them into a rotten tree trunk and that's why they've lived there ever since.

Aww, just like the stories me mam used to tell me when I were a wee bairn.

blacktulip said:

Belloc rules. I started Gormenghast over the weekend: totally new for me and I barely know what it will be about.

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Persist with Gormenghast, if you can, it pays off. More a winter book I think though. I didn't read it til my mid 20s and am glad, I can see how it would overly influence pre/teens.

The beginning of the third book is positively vertiginous. I remember being really impressed with that one.

Quite readable so far. Finnish summer feels so much like a short-term mass hallucination that I do not anticipate any negative seasonally-derived influence.