what are you reading now?

[viktorvaughn]

Isn't it just? Dark as fuck but really keeps your interest. No-one does tangents-coming-off-tangents quite like Bolano.

My flatmate has just got this - so worth a read yeah? Dark weird-thrillerish thing with lots of splintered narratives?

Might read some normal stuff between Infinite Jest and tackling this tho. I've got Russell Hoban's The Mouse and his Child on my shelf to read which i had to read to me as a kid and loved and is supposed to be pretty great.

 

[you]

Derrida, Buchloh, Derrida, Buchloh....

 

[Mr. Tea]

My flatmate has just got this - so worth a read yeah? Dark weird-thrillerish thing with lots of splintered narratives?

Absolutely, one of the best thing I'd read in ages. The style is very strange, a kind of magic-realism-but-not. I think I described it in the Bolano thread as "latent or pregnant with a vague but profound horror", something like that. Reminded me of Burroughs: "America is not a young land; it is old and dirty and evil..."

His The Savage Detectives is meant to be very good too, but I've got a whole shelf of unread books I ought to get through before I buy any more!

 

[slowtrain]

Yeah, I've only read 'The Part about the Critics' so far but golly it is ...'dark'... in exactly that way Tea described.

'pregnant' or some shit.

Really hallucinatory, the whole book is kind of empty except for the main characters, but its that kind of empty that isn't nothing is there but that something is not there.


I've also read Amulet by him which was very good, but it really has nothing on this.

 

[Mr. Tea]

It's like the main characters are ants or fleas crawling around on the skin of this vast, unknowable but indescribably evil Thing, and every now and then one of them gets a tiny, partial glimpse of this Thing, never enough to see all of it or even to begin to understand what it is - just enough of a glimpse to start to feel that there's something there, beneath them and all around them. And then their preoccupation with their own neuroses, careers, sex lives or day-to-day survival distracts them from that glimpse, whether in the higher echelons of academe, Nazi Germany's eastern front or the streets of a violent Mexican border town. I've never read anything like it.

Having said that, the image of a great, brooding evil lurking under the skin of the visible world and causing diseased excrescences to sporadically break through is rather Lovecraftian - reminds me in particular of The Shunned House (great story if you haven't read it).

 

[slowtrain]

Yes, there are bits that remind me of some of the more blasted and bleached out parts of The Place of Dead Roads... Especially the scene where they parachute down into the valley with the creatures who are just inventing language... The bit where its all empty and Kim just knows there is something wrong and wants to get out.

But it isn't really like that.

I'm going to try find a Lovecraft collection today at the 2nd hand book store. Been scared off by all the teenagers but I need to take the dive before it is too late.

I think maybe Juan Rulfo is nearly close, but I don't find Rulfo anywhere near as latent as Bolano. Mostly just the emptiness and massiveness of the environment is similar. Which might just be a Mexican thing.

I want go hang out around border towns now.

 

[slim jenkins]

If they produced an abridged version of Bolano I might read it...you know, the kind of thing Readers Digest put out...for housewives...'cause I'm a lazy bastard, and quite puny, therefore holding a book thicker than 2cm is not easy...

Now reading Stanislaw Lem's The Investigation...in which corpses are being moved by something, or someone...too early to say whether I like it or not...I'm ambiguous about Lem, having read some good and some not-so-appealing to me...

 

[slowtrain]

I get that way about Big books a bit too, but this is really easy to read. I've read 200 pages in just over 2 days.... Usually I would struggle to read 50. It won't take long.

JR however, is giving me very scary looks from on top of the bookshelf....

 

[IdleRich]

Started Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by de Quincey cos it was on my shelf and it seemed appropriate after the weekend I just had. So far no opium eating but plenty of humour and literary criticism. Double thumbs-up at this stage.

 

[Mr. Tea]

My special fudge brings all the boys to the yard!

 

[faustus]

Now reading Stanislaw Lem's The Investigation...in which corpses are being moved by something, or someone...too early to say whether I like it or not...I'm ambiguous about Lem, having read some good and some not-so-appealing to me...

I enjoyed that one.

I'm just finishing Ballard, The Kindness of Women. Like it.

 

[viktorvaughn]

Absolutely. Also, although it's big it's (in most parts at least) kind of a page-turner (not so much because you want to find out what happens next, although at times that is true as well, but because of the sheer fun it is to read) and I don't think it takes long to read. Took me less than two weeks and my friend took it on a one week holiday with him on my recommendation and he has nearly finished it after that. I mean, most books are what, three hundred pages long and I suspect you wouldn't think that reading three of them would necessarily require an investment of an unreasonable amount of time.

Well I finished IJ (or Infinite Pest as it became known to me (mainly jokingly)).

I loved the tennis and Ennet House stories and found Hal and Gately ended up being engaging and moving. It's horribly powerful how it opens with Hal all fucked up and then shows him to be sympathetic throughout the rest of the book. Some amazing sustained set pieces (Gately's fight with the Canadians, Gately's binge at the end of the book, the tennis matches) - DFW clearly had amazing imagination and description skills and I liked his use of varied lexicons according to which narrator voice was in play.

The politics/separatism stuff was less engaging.

The odd/magic realism flourishes stood out a bit cos the tone of the rest of the book is pretty realistic.

I found it odd how Hal started narrating in first person right at the end.

Overall I think it might have been even better with 120 pages edited out.

Character map for the book.

 

[viktorvaughn]

Started Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by de Quincey cos it was on my shelf and it seemed appropriate after the weekend I just had. So far no opium eating but plenty of humour and literary criticism. Double thumbs-up at this stage.

This is one of those books I've always meant to read - it's not super taxing is it?

 

[IdleRich]

Only read a few pages to be honest, been super busy since the opening but not difficult at all - old-fashioned language obviously but I like that and there is a lot of humour. The bit at the start where Coleridge is paying men to physically stop him from entering any druggist's shop but "Seeing as the authority for stopping him was derived simply from himself, naturally these poor men found themselves in a metaphysical fix, not provided for even by Thomas Aquinas" is very funny.

 

[IdleRich]

"I loved the tennis and Ennet House stories and found Hal and Gately ended up being engaging and moving. It's horribly powerful how it opens with Hal all fucked up and then shows him to be sympathetic throughout the rest of the book. Some amazing sustained set pieces (Gately's fight with the Canadians, Gately's binge at the end of the book, the tennis matches) - DFW clearly had amazing imagination and description skills and I liked his use of varied lexicons according to which narrator voice was in play.
The politics/separatism stuff was less engaging.
The odd/magic realism flourishes stood out a bit cos the tone of the rest of the book is pretty realistic.
I found it odd how Hal started narrating in first person right at the end.
Overall I think it might have been even better with 120 pages edited out."

I loved the separatism stuff and I liked the magic-realism type stuff - although to me it didn't really have the feel of mr as such, something about the style although I suppose that mr just denotes magic stuff happening in a real way and says nothing about the writing style - I probably just associate it with a certain style because it's usually written in a certain way although it doesn't have to be. Or am I wrong about that?
Anyway, I don't think those bits stood out cos the whole book is so strange and takes place against such a strange backdrop, they certainly didn't seem out of keeping with everything else. Which specific bits are you referring to?
I liked all the separatist stuff too, especially the huge footnote about the game where they jump in front of trains. Seems that the politics bit is the bit that a lot of people don't like though for some reason.

 

[viktorvaughn]

I loved the separatism stuff and I liked the magic-realism type stuff - although to me it didn't really have the feel of mr as such, something about the style although I suppose that mr just denotes magic stuff happening in a real way and says nothing about the writing style - I probably just associate it with a certain style because it's usually written in a certain way although it doesn't have to be. Or am I wrong about that?
Anyway, I don't think those bits stood out cos the whole book is so strange and takes place against such a strange backdrop, they certainly didn't seem out of keeping with everything else. Which specific bits are you referring to?
I liked all the separatist stuff too, especially the huge footnote about the game where they jump in front of trains. Seems that the politics bit is the bit that a lot of people don't like though for some reason.

I agree it deffo didn't feel like MR at all, I guess we have been conditioned to associate certain types of writers with MR (first names most people would say I bet would be GG Marquez and maybe Rushdie) so MR is associated with South American 'exotic' things and post-colonial narratives. It's not something one associated with stories about drug addicts and junior tennis players...I guess? So I think you are right on it - MR describes a style but has come to be connected with types of content.

It didn't spoilt to book or anything but the bits where the beds started floating in the air in the night and Ortho Stice's head gets stuck to the window and his head-skin expands to 50cm when he pulls it off. These moments all occur towards the end of the book and felt like they might be hinting at some big denouement where space/time fucks up and something weird happens (not in a full on psy-fi way, maybe something symbolic of a big realization for Hal or something). But cos 99% of the book isn't written like that it made me think why chuck that in towards the end. Also: why is it set in the future? All the main themes and stories could be done in the present day (ok apart from the separatism stuff I suppose)...

I didn't really enjoy the script stlye bits with the president in.

Maybe I just wanted to see the emotion invested in the twin human stories of Hal/Tennis and Gately/Ennet/Drugs (which we brilliant counterpoints) maxed out and compliment each other and found the other bits therefore a distraction, or at least less enjoyable, as I liked the two central pillars of the book so much.

 

[viktorvaughn]

Next on my list

Queer - William Burrough
Ghost Milk - Iain Sinclair (read half)
Some Dorris Lessing Psy-fi stuff
The Wizard of Earthsea series - Ursula le Guin
My Name is Red - Orhan Pamuk
The Slap maybe if good...?

 

[IdleRich]

"It didn't spoilt to book or anything but the bits where the beds started floating in the air in the night and Ortho Stice's head gets stuck to the window and his head-skin expands to 50cm when he pulls it off. These moments all occur towards the end of the book and felt like they might be hinting at some big denouement where space/time fucks up and something weird happens (not in a full on psy-fi way, maybe something symbolic of a big realization for Hal or something). But cos 99% of the book isn't written like that it made me think why chuck that in towards the end. Also: why is it set in the future? All the main themes and stories could be done in the present day (ok apart from the separatism stuff I suppose).."

But before that there were loads of things like the siamese-twin tennis champions and the whole narrative about the concavity/convexity with the enormous herds of giant hamsters was so ridiculous it was close to being magic. Also the whole sports complex where they were teaching such hardcore academic stuff was a joke wasn't it?

 

[Mr. Tea]

Just over halfway through Crime and Punishment and starting to think Raskolnikov might be one of the most fascinating characters I've ever read. Luka? Anyone?

 

[pattycakes_]

yeah, c&p was the only book to ever get my heart physically racing. dostoyevsky has a way of really reaching deep inside of you. been meaning to start the brothers karamazov but keep putting it off.