what are you reading now?

Add me to the list of folk who failed to finish Moby Dick.

Reading Neil Gaiman at the minute. In spanish! Despite the slight language handicap the pages are flying by. Just finished Stardust and straight on to American Gods. Better than the Sandman (which I liked too).

I wonder how many Tim Burton fans are into Gaiman's stuff? He does the gothic fantasy cartoony thing a million times better. Saw that Alice in Wonderland film over xmas - pile of pap.

Corpsey said:

Lolita is exhaustingly brilliant.

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Yeah, it's great. I don't have a problem with highly mannered writing as long as it's done well, and Lolita is done very, very well. Humbert Humbert is such a well-constructed antihero. Also, I allowed myself a proper Brass Eye lol at the line "Let me be sentimental for the nonce...".

Corpsey said:

I failed to read Moby Dick Just couldn't keep it up, I was really enjoying it too.

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It's weird, I've also had occasions when I've inexplicably stopped reading a book I was really enjoying. I read Book I of Don Quixote about ten years ago or something, really loved it, got a few chapters into Book II and just ran out of steam for some reason. I think partly is was because I was reading the classic 300ish-year-old translation, which doesn't bother me at all as far as the language goes but has absolutely no paragraphing at all, which makes it quite hard work to read. I ought to have another go at it after I've finished Tristram Shandy (which I've been reading in spurts since last spring ) since there's a definite similarity in the humour and tone, which I think isn't coincidental because apparently Laurence Sterne was a big fan of the book.

Cool that you're digging Lovecraft. His style is so unique, I mean he's got passages that genuinely make your skin creep with sublime horror or impart a real thrill of beauty and grandeur, and then he's got passages that just make you laugh out loud, often in the same story. I think his best by a mile is 'The Colour Out Of Space', but if you haven't read it already it might be a good idea to read a few of his other biggies (basically, the 'Great Texts' as listed by Houellebeqc) before reading that one, purely to avoid any sense of letdown. The 'Silver Key' stories are also absolute gems - there are parts in the second one that read for all the world like a trip report by someone who's just freebased a fuckton of DMT, which is kind of funny as I get the impression HPL was probably the sort who gets light-headed after a small glass of sherry.

If you'll permit a shameless plug, I wrote a few words on HPL and materialism which you might find mildly diverting, although it's also about Cyclonopedia (dunno if you read that).

Don Quixote - another epic that I've actually finished, prompted by the new translation that came out a few years back. You lot are making me feel like one of those studious Readers of Epics, which I certainly am not. I'll drop a book at the blink of an eye, even one I'm enjoying, usually because The Next One's just dropped through the letterbox or been found in a shoppe - how fickle!

Currently enjoying In Search of a Concrete Music by Pierre Schaeffer (just covered it on the blog). Wonderful insights into his struggles via the journal, as well as technical analysis of how he composed, which is less interesting to the lay reader, of course.

Byron Easy - Jude Cook
HHhH - Laurent Binet
Moody's Vol1 biog of Ezra Pound
Ross Raisen - God's Own Country

I know you've all read it already but I picked up the first one of the Red Riding books (1974) in a charity shop yesterday and it's got me hooked. Well, I've got maybe ten pages to read so hooked isn't the right word. It really is a sordid little book. At times it verges on brilliance but there is a suspicion that at other times the author is struggling so just puts in a bit about something smelling of shit to distract you. I've heard the later books are more focussed and I did enjoy the tv programme a couple of years back so I guess I will check the rest out. My (distant) memories of Britain in the seventies do have it as much grimmer than it is now although not as grim as Peace would have it of course.
Before that been reading some Russian stuff - The Suitcase by Doblatov is a great book of wry memories of Communist Russia sparked off by an immigrant's tiny store of possessions. Also The Backbone Flute by Markovsky is some pretty full on poetry if you like that kind of thing.

i'm just about to start on Doris Lessing - The Golden Notebook as part of my ongoing new year's resolution not to read any american male authors in 2013. Should I expect good things?

From what I remember, no.

really enjoying tom wolfe's bonfire of the vanities ya know. been meaning to read it for about 5 years

Moody's Vol1 biog of Ezra Pound

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Is this any good?

This is great:

IdleRich said:

From what I remember, no.

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But it won the nobel prize and everything! Oh well. I've just finished her preface to the book which was good I thought, I'm gonna wade into this thing and see how it goes - hoist it up the flagpole and see if it flies, etc

BareBones said:

i'm just about to start on Doris Lessing - The Golden Notebook as part of my ongoing new year's resolution not to read any american male authors in 2013. Should I expect good things?

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I read embarrassingly few female authors myself but I read Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye last year and really, really enjoyed it. And my girlfriend's reading Why be happy when you can be normal? by Jeanette Winterson which she says is excellent, in contrast to her most recent book which is apparently very boring despite being about lesbian witches.

craner said:

Is this any good?

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Oliver -Probably one for those who already have a working knowledge of Pound - it's very thorough and a bit dry in places but his stuff on the poems is very good - his readings of the early Cantos, Sextus and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley very convincing. I think he is stuck with not wanting to get drawn into the sexy stuff about who slept with whom and remain very much about the work - fair enough but I enjoyed Judd's biog of Ford Madox Ford because he was prepared to see his hero with his trousers round his ankles and still do a good job of explaining why he was such a crucial figure in the birth of modernism, as Pound was too.

Vol 2 might be a hard sell - whilst the Canto project seriously gets underway he's going to have to find a way to present the Universal Credit economics and concomitant accusations of fascism which fits with the bloke who writes the Pisan cantos. Looked online and haven't seen a release date.

Finally, I read quite rapidly and this took me much longer than i usually would - partly because i went back to the poems but also probably because it wasn't in the most lively style. But that's ok, i had the time.

Hope that answers your question, I think there was a one vol biog in the late 80s but when I picked it up it looked a darn sight more sensationalist and I think Moody has gone for the respectable academic tome approach.

Mr. Tea said:

I read embarrassingly few female authors myself but I read Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye last year and really, really enjoyed it. And my girlfriend's reading Why be happy when you can be normal? by Jeanette Winterson which she says is excellent, in contrast to her most recent book which is apparently very boring despite being about lesbian witches.

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Everyone should read Nicola Barker. Everything by her but if you're being picky then Behindlings, The Yips and Darkmans.

Zadie Smith's last is great - suicide by dissensus sneers I expect.

Mantel cannot be ignored either but you knew that already.

Thanks, Jenks. I like the sexy stuff. In any Pound biography you have to have 1920s sexy stuff right alongside exegesis. No reason why Volume 2 should be hard-going, in my opinion. Pound, on foot, making for the Salo Republic across war-ravaged Italy, composing fascist cantos in his head, in Italian -- what could be more mad, more exciting? Hanging out in the Eiffel Tower restaurant with Wyndham Lewis and Nancy Cunard? I don't think so.

jenks said:

Everyone should read Nicola Barker. Everything by her but if you're being picky then Behindlings, The Yips and Darkmans.

Zadie Smith's last is great - suicide by dissensus sneers I expect.

Mantel cannot be ignored either but you knew that already.

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Mantel is exceptional. Wolf Hall is outstandingly written and beautifully touching. Looking forward to the conclusion of the trilogy. Quite enjoyed 'The Giant O'Brien' as well, and 'A place of greater safety', though a bit of a slog is well worth it.

craner said:

-- what could be more mad, more exciting?

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and people wonder why I rave about him.

Mr. Tea said:

I read embarrassingly few female authors myself

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me too, only two books! sleep has his house by anna kavan and the heart is a lonely hunter by carson mccullers. quite worrying really.

anyway i'm currently reading the life and games of mikhail tal, which i am loving so far.

Mr. Tea said:

It's weird, I've also had occasions when I've inexplicably stopped reading a book I was really enjoying. I read Book I of Don Quixote about ten years ago or something, really loved it, got a few chapters into Book II and just ran out of steam for some reason. I think partly is was because I was reading the classic 300ish-year-old translation, which doesn't bother me at all as far as the language goes but has absolutely no paragraphing at all, which makes it quite hard work to read. I ought to have another go at it after I've finished Tristram Shandy (which I've been reading in spurts since last spring ) since there's a definite similarity in the humour and tone, which I think isn't coincidental because apparently Laurence Sterne was a big fan of the book.

Cool that you're digging Lovecraft. His style is so unique, I mean he's got passages that genuinely make your skin creep with sublime horror or impart a real thrill of beauty and grandeur, and then he's got passages that just make you laugh out loud, often in the same story. I think his best by a mile is 'The Colour Out Of Space', but if you haven't read it already it might be a good idea to read a few of his other biggies (basically, the 'Great Texts' as listed by Houellebeqc) before reading that one, purely to avoid any sense of letdown. The 'Silver Key' stories are also absolute gems - there are parts in the second one that read for all the world like a trip report by someone who's just freebased a fuckton of DMT, which is kind of funny as I get the impression HPL was probably the sort who gets light-headed after a small glass of sherry.

If you'll permit a shameless plug, I wrote a few words on HPL and materialism which you might find mildly diverting, although it's also about Cyclonopedia (dunno if you read that).

Click to expand...

I'll read that Lovecraft thing when I get a minute.

I've got about halfway through loads of books in my time, its highly irritating because usually I'm enjoying the book and then I get sidetracked for a few days or weeks and suddenly it becomes the thing on the shelf, mocking me. That happened with Moby Dick. It happened years ago with Anna Karenina which I was absolutely in love with. I read half of it on holiday in Switzerland (no TV, no internet etc.) and then I got home and it gathered dust. Doing an MA recently FORCED me to read the whole of 'Crime and Punishment' and 'Sentimental Education' and 'The Trial' and more, which was painful but a blessing, too.

I'm currently reading a book by George Steiner on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky which is really good and makes me want to read Dostoevsky in particular again. I read 'The Brothers Karamazov' when I was 18 and I don't think I was remotely ready for it, it was really a pretentious/dutiful thing to do. See also: reading Kafka as a teenager.

After I've finished that I'm going to read 'Macbeth' or 'The Tempest' by Shakespeare cos they're relatively short and I want to see what all the fuss is about (I mean, I sort of know but I've not read any Shakespeare since school, a decade ago). After that I still have Moby Dick eyeing me up, would also like (comically, given my serial failures with big doorstop epics) to read 'Middlemarch' and 'The Iliad'.

The hard thing for me is finding time to read now that I have a job. You don't really want to (well, I don't really want to) get home from a day at the office and start reading epic tragedy. But there has to be time for it, doesn't there?

Lovecraft - I've read 'The Colour Out Of Space' and I agree its very good. I also really like 'The Haunter of the Dark' (which I have listened to, read by the fantastic Wayne June, who has a voice uniquely well suited to saying words like ''hideous'' and ''sinister''), 'The Call of Cthulu', 'The Lurking Fear'... all the big ones.

One interesting thing Steiner talks about in the Dostoevsky/Tolstoy book is how Dostoevsky drew on the gothic tradition in constructing his melodramatic plots - the same wellspring which gave birth to horror and sci-fi. Steiner writes that though the material Dostoevsky works with is often hackneyed, sentimental and literally incredible, the way his genius infuses these stock situations with depth and power is what distinguishes him (which I suppose is something that could be said of Lovecraft to an extent). Also the idea that, for Dostoevsky, realism was not a sufficient mode for expressing the ''truth'' of human nature and existence. (in D.'s view) Only at the extremes of tragic drama could we get to the naked reality that realists only pretend to document with their scrupulous rendering of texture, objects, psychological 'subtleties' and so on.

Here's an example of Wayne June reading Lovecraft, if you haven't heard his readings before:


I often trundle around the house, intoning to myself in a gravelly voice ''the HID-E-OUS dishes, MOCKING me with their eldritch grime.''