what are you reading now?

[grizzleb]

Yeah some of them want a girlfriend experience (GFE) apparently, think I'll be getting in touch. Good lookin out bra

btw I misplaced my personal pronouns in that last post - should have read 'I've still not got the nuts for Ulysses'.

 

[Corpsey]

bandshell - I think Dubliners is one of my favourite books, I just love it. Don't think I've read naturalism at the quality of it anywhere else. And it's certainly the best short story collection I've read.

Read Chekhov's short stories if you haven't already, quite similar to Dubliners in many respects. I absolutely love Chekhov's stories.

 

[yyaldrin]

I finished reading My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk some days ago and thought it was beautiful. Now reading Coming Up for Air by George Orwell.

 

[yyaldrin]

last several things completed:

Dreaming of Babylon - Richard Brautigan
1Q84 - Haruki Murakami
In the Miso Soup - Ryu Murakami
Piercing - Ryu Murakami


reading now:

Jakob Von Gunten - Robert Walser
Exercises in Style - Raymond Queneau
The Franchiser - Stanley Elkin
Herman Hesse - Stories of Five Decades

on deck:

Tales of Pirx the Pilot - Stanislaw Lem
The Living End - Stanley Elkin
Rhinocerus - Eugène Ionesco

I enjoyed Rhinoceros but maybe that's because I'm a fan of allegories, how did you come about getting this?

 

[drilla]

found it in a used book shop.. liked the title and the cover art. i'm not the greatest fan of allegory but haven't read any modern ones. the man at the register told me it was made into a "strange movie" but i looked it up and it's a gene wilder thing so i don't know

 

[luka]

to get girlfriends sit at an outdoor table at a cafe smoking a cig and drinking an espresso and reading a prominently displayed work of difficult modernist literature paperback.they will all come over to you and say 'you look interesting. lets talk about poetry'

 

[viktorvaughn]

I'm reading Middlesex and enjoying it plenty.

 

[IdleRich]

yyaldrin - what did you think of that Miso Soup one? Edit - sorry, I mean Drilla.

 

[baboon2004]

Could never get on with Middlesex. Probably not fair, but it reminded me of books I hated and I couldn't get into it.

Miso Soup was pretty good. Nasty and bleak, but good. I'm automatically well disposed towards short books/novellas anyways however. I wonder if he profited from confusion with his more famous namesake at the beginning of his career?

Anyone read this? A friend showed it to me the other day and it looks completely nuts.

 

[grizzleb]

I just started reading 'Cosmos' by Gombrowicz, and have for Ferdydurke lined up. Seems like a pretty funny writer from what I've read thus far.

Also reading 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' by 18th century Scottish novelist James Hogg. Quite enjoying it so far, though I'm yet to get to the meat of the book. I'm hoping it's less mannered and novelistic than it has been so far.

 

[bruno]

I just started reading 'Cosmos' by Gombrowicz, and have for Ferdydurke lined up. Seems like a pretty funny writer from what I've read thus far.

very curious, i'm reading the same book. it must be the financial crisis. it's very psychedelic and humorous, as you point out, but i've only read the first chapter, it could become something else. it was a choice between this and pornografia (here they are separate books) so i went with this first to get a sense of the author. i also picked up la rochefoucauld's maximes, which i'm reading in between, and sade's justine, which looks great on the shelf.

 

[Lucia Lanigan]

I really liked Cosmos, even though I read the wrong translation by most accounts (I've got the one that comes with Pornografia; the stand-alone one is supposed to be the, er, one). Good era of fiction, that. If you're into the absurdity of it when one of them shouts 'Berg!' get to Ann Quin's Berg next.

 

[blacktulip]

Also reading 'The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner' by 18th century Scottish novelist James Hogg. Quite enjoying it so far, though I'm yet to get to the meat of the book. I'm hoping it's less mannered and novelistic than it has been so far.

Like that one a lot. Have you read 'Caleb Williams'? Read those two in the same week about 13 years ago. Both made an impression and I can't separate them somehow.

 

[IdleRich]

"If you're into the absurdity of it when one of them shouts 'Berg!' get to Ann Quin's Berg next."

Strange book.
Just read Beloved by Toni Morrison - knew it was gonna be good, didn't realise it was gonna be (kinda) magic-realism which is something I know people have a problem with - not me though, when it's done like this it just adds to the power of what's an unbelievably depressing and nasty book. Nasty in terms of its subject matter (slavery) rather than its writing, that's beautiful and heartbreaking all the way through. It really makes you think about slavery, we know it's a bad thing of course and so on but this really makes you think about what it means, for slave and master, although mainly slave. How if you're not free your thoughts and dreams aren't free, they all belong to someone else. And also, on a more practical level, how families were broken up and how people were bred like animals to make more slaves.
Anyways, if you haven't read it, read it.

 

[bruno]

I really liked Cosmos, even though I read the wrong translation by most accounts (I've got the one that comes with Pornografia; the stand-alone one is supposed to be the, er, one). Good era of fiction, that. If you're into the absurdity of it when one of them shouts 'Berg!' get to Ann Quin's Berg next.

thanks, i'll look it up.

 

[Mr. Tea]

...didn't realise it was gonna be (kinda) magic-realism which is something I know people have a problem with...

Magic realism seems to be a genre that a lot of people who like Serious Books really dislike. I suspect they see it as potentially quite a lazy way to write, since it obviously frees the writer from the traditional constraints of consistency, continuity and plausibility, or that it seems self-indulgent or that it's just 'fantasy for grown-ups'. I'm reminded of a bit in one of Ian McEwan's books from a few years ago, where he subtly takes the piss out of a magic-realist sequence in one of his own books from the '80s.

I get on fairly well with it as a whole, I'd say.

 

[bruno]

i think the reason the genre lacks prestige is because lesser writers have flogged the horse to death, and because (in its narrow sense) it presents a charicature of the spanish-speaking world as an exotic place where reason is suspended and nothing makes sense (which, to be fair, is not that far off the mark in some cases) when in reality these places are governed by the same forces as anywhere else: economics, class, race and so on. if what it's really about is heightened, hallucinatory reality, as in this excellent book cosmos, as in italo calvino, then i like the idea of magical realism, if not the actual genre. i also need to re-evaluate garcía márquez, who i am (probably unfairly) prejudiced against.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Thought you might have something to say on this topic, bruno...

I guess GGM is the only classic Latin American magic realist author I've read, unless you count Bolano - I don't know if 2666 is exactly magic realism per se. It didn't have lots of supernatural or impossible things happening in it but I found the hallucinatory/oneiric quality of the writing very magic-realist or at least magic-realist inspired.

What else...does Burroughs count? Pynchon?

 

[bruno]

to be honest i have little to say on the topic as i tend to avoid fantastic literature with few exceptions. in general i understand magical realism as slightly tweaked reality with colourful occurences and that sort of thing rather than some deep hallucinatory exploration of reality or bending of reality. what i see in bolaño is more borges than magical realism, at the same time i've only read two of his books so i am in no position to say anything about him. with burroughs in my view you have full-on horror/nightmare surrealism rather than tweaked reality, if there is anything magical in that it's a very fucked-up, drug-fuelled mayan or north-african kind of magic.

 

[bruno]

i do like burroughs though, the electronic revolution in particular, and the soft machine, but i'm not sure i would read him again.