pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
You into it? I read Capricorn earlier in the year and found it a bit of a slog.

I'm still not sure about it. First Miller I've read. Hasn't hooked me in half as much as Do Androids Dream.. did a few weeks ago, but I'm only a few chapters in. I heard Sexus is better.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
dhl's the plumed serpent. if you get in a flap about
hearts of darkness being racist never open this book. you'd (rightly) never get away
with it now.
Yeah, I remember being gobsmacked by his attitudes in that book. Just amazed. Although I also remember my girlfriend at the time was living in Mexico when I read it and she said something along the lines of "Yeah that book says some terrible racist stuff about Mexicans... the worst thing is he is spot on".
 

luka

Well-known member
Yeah, I remember being gobsmacked by his attitudes in that book. Just amazed. Although I also remember my girlfriend at the time was living in Mexico when I read it and she said something along the lines of "Yeah that book says some terrible racist stuff about Mexicans... the worst thing is he is spot on".

did you enjoy it? i really loved it. the funny thing is i dont think i could sit through one of his set in 'rural staffordshire' or whatever. i needed the exotica.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I don't remember it that well to be honest. Thinking back to what was going on with me then it must have been more than fifteen years ago. I think I remember finding it frustrating cos the good bits were sorta weighed down by his prejudices but really I can't remember what those good bits were I'm afraid.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Sons and Lovers (set in Notts if I remember rightly) was a struggle though. I think you're right about the exotic setting bringing out something that you won't see (or won't notice) in books he set in the UK.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Their Brilliant Careers by Ryan O'Neill - ostensibly a series of biographical sketches of twentieth century Australian writers but in fact a huge po-mo joke. all the writers are fictional and each of the lives intersect creating a grand narrative of duplicity and venality. Even the index is part of the joke.
Sounds really interesting, does it live up to the description?
I just read Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg - really strange book presented with a fake forward and afterword as a document found in the grave of an unreliable narrator who writes about how he is haunted by a malevolent and mysterious character (or possibly just imagines that he is) and allows this guy to prevail upon his twisted religious beliefs to lead him into at least one murder - but likely several more. It's hard to figure out for sure just what's going on due to the narrator's loss of great chunks of time and his friend's ability to impersonate him. I don't know of much else like that being written in 1824.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I've been reading Macbeth at a leisurely pace, underlining and making notes and checking the notes to find out the meaning of words. Obviously this breaks up the flow of reading and probably robs the language of its music somewhat but OTOH it does make me appreciate Shakespeare's skill at weaving together themes and motifs and images (e.g. the reoccurrence of images of the stars, of night, of intoxication, the word "tomorrow", and so on and on at this petty pace...).

Always find Shakespeare difficult because of all the stuff I've read about him, around him.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
And been reading various of Donne's Songs and Sonnets and been routinely dazzled - e.g. 'A Fever' and the sonnet which addresses the 'sunne'.
 

jenks

thread death
Collected short stories of both Grace Paley and Lucia Berlin - first class stuff from two writers i knew very little about before i started out on them.

Just finished Alejandro Zambra's My Documents - Chilean writer who treads a fine line between autofiction, post modern self awareness and actually moving short stories.

Charles Baxter's Burning Down The House - he writes really well about what he likes and dislikes about fiction - his pages on Joyce's The Dead are very good and i like someone who clearly states what he doesnt want writers to do - his chapter Against Epiphanies is funny and skewers those 'and suddenly i realised...' writers.

and EEG by Daša Drndić the Croatian writer who died earlier this year - i have written about her before on here.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I've been reading "The Fifth Elephant" by Terry Pratchett (a favourite of old) and enjoying every page, burning through it, divested of the need to analyse and process, a horrible/useful (I waver) habit I picked up in university, which probably ruinously confirmed that it is a "talent" of mine.

Anyway, having that much fun reading made me wonder why I read other books that I read, often reluctantly. Sometimes the reluctance melts almost entirely - as when I read Paradise Lost. Which is, I think, more "important" than Wuthering Heights, say, even though I actually burned through the latter when I read it.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Paul Bowles - Let It Come Down is the latest one I've pulled out of one pile or off the top of another. I actually didn't know much about this book before starting it other than that it was set in Tangiers and I also had a vague belief that it contained some undefined seedy elements. I keep getting interrupted in my reading sadly - almost in a kinda of terrible sitcom manner - but so far I can absolutely confirm that my original thoughts were one hundred percent correct. It does indeed take place in Tangiers and there are some prostitutes, smugglers and guys trying to lead tourists to watch dirty movies in the first few pages. Actually there is one other thing I knew which is that a lot of people seem to really rate the book and I will say that I'm already intrigued. I don't have any idea at all of what is going to happen but I already have this sense that all will not go well. These first few pages have brought a foreshadowing of doom... although maybe I'm just imagining things and it will go in a direction totally different from that which I'm expecting. But I think I'm right, as well as the atmosphere I believe myself to have perceived, there is the fact that the nearest thing to a main protagonist is an American who has moved to Morocco on a whim to take up a position in the office of a company run by an old school friend. Almost immediately it becomes clear that this guy is hopelessly out of his depth and for good measure he's mentally unequipped to learn to swim.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Jenks - I just started reading Their Brilliant Careers as you made it sound interesting. The first chapter seems to be a pisstake of (the author of) those Gor books. I never read any of them but I remember often seeing shelves full of them in bookshops when I was little and thinking "What the fuck are they?" and "Why are they so many of them?". I'm actually kinda intrigued to read some of them now...

Gor.jpg
 
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jenks

thread death
Jenks - I just started reading Their Brilliant Careers as you made it sound interesting. The first chapter seems to be a pisstake of (the author of) those Gor books. I never read any of them but I remember often seeing shelves full of them in bookshops when I was little and thinking "What the fuck are they?" and "Why are they so many of them?". I'm actually kinda intrigued to read some of them now...

View attachment 779

I think by the time you finish there wont be a literary genre he hasn't ripped the piss out of - it's very clever but not in a self regarding way. I really cannot understand why it hasn't been more widely praised. There is a very funny sting in its tail as well.
 

jenks

thread death
Wendy Erskine's Sweet Home - very impressive short story debut

Anne Boyer - A Handbook of Disappointed Fate - great essays by author of Garments Against women - a kind of poetry/not poetry book from a couple of years ago

and a new translation of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight - the perfect Christmas book for our times - head chopping, a quest, temptation and penance.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I think by the time you finish there wont be a literary genre he hasn't ripped the piss out of - it's very clever but not in a self regarding way. I really cannot understand why it hasn't been more widely praised. There is a very funny sting in its tail as well.
But what about Gor? Have you read them? OK, not you maybe, but someone...
 
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